LucidMedia announced two strategic personnel milestones last week which will take the company to the next level as a media platform. We hired Natalie Mazer as Vice President of Optimization to maximize the performance of the LucidMedia demand-side platform. We also announced that Paul Rostkowski, formerly Vice President of Sales, has been promoted to Chief Revenue Officer (CRO).

We sat down with them to discuss the future of both LucidMedia and the digital advertising landscape.

LucidMedia: What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the interactive advertising industry?

Natalie:  The fragmentation of audience across media has been challenging for agencies and their clients. Where once direct-from-publisher inventory was sufficient to achieve performance, web audiences have become increasingly diffuse, particularly with the advent of mobile and video advertising. It takes sophisticated technology to be able to reach the right users at the right time and at the right price.

Paul:  The privacy debate continues to be a hot issue for the digital advertising industry.  Media companies need to support our industry groups in their efforts to educate the public. LucidMedia was one of the first DSPs to offer a real-time network opt-out on our homepage.  We work closely with the industry groups like IAB, NAI and Privacy Choice to ensure we are employing the industry’s best practices when it comes to privacy.

LM:  What problem is LucidMedia solving today with its online advertising management platform?

Natalie:  In a competitive economic climate, advertisers are looking to improve efficiency. With universal frequency capping and a powerful optimization engine, the LucidMedia platform produces goal-driven results within budget.

Paul:  Brand safety is a major concern for brand advertisers. Agencies and advertisers come to us for protection that preemptively identifies unsafe impressions and ensures that ads appear only on pages with appropriate content.

LM: You’ve both been involved in start-ups for years. What is your number one tip for entrepreneurs in the technology sector?

Natalie:  Hire a team with complementary skills and the right attitude. It may be tempting to hire all super-stars, but that strategy is expensive and doesn’t guarantee the creation of a functional corporate culture.

Paul:  Focus on getting your product to market and getting revenue in the door when you’re first starting.  The more you have coming in, the better off you’ll be in the long-run.

LM:  Please discuss the recent partnerships LucidMedia has formed and what impact that has had on the business.

Natalie: Getting all the major data providers on-platform has been a huge step for LucidMedia. Our engineering team has been focused on these efforts for some time and now that’s up and running, the potential is enormous.

Paul:  On-platform video and mobile buying is the next frontier for display advertising.  It has been a real growth area for us and our partners, particularly [mobile advertising network] MobClix and [rich media pioneer] Oggi Finogi.

LM:  What is next in advertising business management? How do you see this evolving in the next two to three years?

Paul:  As the big exchanges and agency holding companies choose their partners, there will be another technical revolution. Right now everyone is focused on building out platforms, but soon the push will shift to integrating those solutions. That’s where a company like LucidMedia, with the combined expertise of eight technology-side experts, will excel.

Natalie:  I agree with Paul. White label solutions are becoming the norm. Platforms that exist with purchased technology, but that don’t have the back-end engineering support will experience difficulties when it comes to complex integrations.

LM:  What major trends do you see affecting LucidMedia the most recently?

Paul:  Agency trading desks have been adopting technology like crazy, trying to keep up with DSPs and all the data providers rolling out user interfaces. In some cases, it may be easier to acquire than to build.

Natalie:  There continues to be confusion surrounding RTB and what it means for online advertising.  Everyone bids in real-time now; it’s how the platform decides what to bid that’s the real differentiator.

There’s something about advertising online that makes some marketers forget all they once knew about the marketing basics. We’ve seen it most dramatically recently in the full-scale social media pushes that some companies are making. For example, in the gold rush to grab precious social media eyeballs, all strategic concerns are forgotten. So if you’re considering moving a portion of your traditional ad spend online, here’s a list of common mistakes that we see some display advertisers make when they start managing their own campaigns for the first time.

1.  Not Testing Creative

When it comes to basic industry best practices, display is no different from any other advertising medium. Though experience helps in determining what creative, tagline or call to action will work best for your brand, the most successful advertisers allocate a portion of their spend—particularly early on in a campaign—to A/B testing creative elements. It might not seem like a color, word change, or even an exclamation point could make a huge difference, but it often does.  You test layouts and colors and fonts in your print ads so why not do it online too? Try different things online in small batches across a broad swath of media and heavy up on the components that work.

2.  Not Ramping-up Properly

Any campaign can benefit from a ramp-up period. The temptation at the start of a campaign is to want to see dramatic results quickly. However, particularly when you’re working within an auto-bid or optimized framework, the results will be better later on if the campaign starts slower and makes common sense optimization changes incrementally until the optimum performance pockets are found and scaled. This lets your platform of choice learn where the valuable impressions are and pick more like those in the future.

3.  Not Focusing on Performance

With the proliferation of all sorts of data, there is a strong temptation to want to limit buying to a very narrow demographic segment because you have always marketed to that particular audience effectively. However, just because you can buy highly specific segments doesn’t mean you should when online. Most campaigns are more effective when there are a wider range of potential impressions to bid on. Some campaigns can benefit from a very high CPM and a very narrow slice of the population, but this is not true for most advertisers. If this is your first foray into display, cast your net a little wider and look for those wonderful serendipitous discoveries that work for your brand.

4.  Not Addressing Saturation

You can saturate your audience with a message in any medium and nowhere is that more true than when you are online because it’s so easy to acquire massive amounts of media.  It’s easy to launch your campaign, arrive at the right media mix and creative elements, then let it run its course.  But a long, multi-month flights should have multiple creatives and messages ready if and when performance drops off.  A smart frequency capping strategy helps but even with just a few daily exposures your customers can get turned off quickly.  Change it up regularly and see if that doesn’t keep the conversions coming right up to the ending bell.

If you can avoid these simple newbie mistakes you’ll be on your way to a successful display campaign. All it takes is a little know-how, a little experience, and a lot of common sense and you will quickly find the combination of tactics that work for your particular brand online.

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.