Working with data partner eXelate, LucidMedia has been included in their Premier Media Partnership (PMP) program, making it easier for media buyers to purchase data along with their ad inventory in the LucidMedia demand-side platform. Our full on-platform data integration allows for our reporting, insights, brand safety and reach to be applied to the data eXelate provides through the platform.

You can get the full story from AdWeek.

Targeting seems like a big differentiator to those new to the demand-side platform (DSP) or online advertising marketplace. However, unless an ad management platform has their own server-side cookie database or proprietary technology (and some do), pretty much everyone has the access to the same data.  But what data is that exactly? What’s available? What can data not do? And most importantly, what works?

In this article, we‘re going to break down different types of targeting and tell a little bit of truth about each type.

Third party user data

There are an ever-profilerating number of companies in the marketplace collecting and segmenting user data. Some of the big names in this space are BlueKai, eXelate, AlmondNet, Bizo and TargusInfo. To use this data, an ad network or a DSP forms a partnership with one or more of these companies and then sells that data through their platform to their customers in the form of audience segments.

Recent hysteria to the contrary, none of this data contains information that makes any one user personally identifiable to the data provider, DSP, ad network or, further downstream, agency or advertiser/client. In fact, if it did, it really wouldn’t be of tremendous value. The main benefit of this kind of data is in the volume of users in any particular segment. If a segment doesn’t contain enough users, the network or DSP isn’t going to see enough impressions to achieve whatever back-end goals the agency or advertiser may have. One perfect user isn’t equal to one million sort of perfect users. The power of digital media is in its ability to scale to achieve reach. If you want one perfect user, send them a letter.

Retargeting

When a user visits a web page, cookies can be used to “tag” that browser. That tag allows an advertiser to them show ads on other sites for that advertiser’s products after that user has left the advertiser’s page. In combination with a big push in other marketing and advertising channels, it is possible to get a lot of browsers “tagged” in a short period of time.

This is not technically complicated and nearly any online advertising management platform can do it. Particularly if an advertiser has not implemented retargeting before, it can provide a tremendous boost to traffic and, ultimately, conversions. The trick is not to implement it clumsily, which is where a good agency or ad operations team will be an asset. Retargeting is one of those display advertising tactics that can come off as “creepy” to an individual user (for example, the pair of pants that followed one user around the internet for weeks, even after the person had made a purchase).  However, done correctly, retargeting is both effective and appreciated by users, who like seeing ads that are relevant to them better than ads that have nothing to do with their interests.

Targeting typically costs a little extra than just serving as many impressions as many places as possible for as little cost as possible, but it’s also more effective when implemented by a talented ad operations team or competent interactive agency. Have you used third party data? What do you think about recent conversations about restricting the use of targeting?

Protecting the privacy of online users when it comes to digital advertising is fast becoming the hot topic.  Digital advertising associations, privacy watchdog organizations, and even Capitol Hill are all wading deeply into the privacy waters.  With all this change going on around us it is a good time to reiterate LucidMedia’s strong stance on protecting the privacy of online users who receive advertisements through our digital ad management platform.

Early last year the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began issuing revised guidelines for behavioral advertising.  And the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) recently launched a new program that calls for labeling online ads that their members serve based on the habits of online consumers.  You can check out AboutAds.info for more information on the new labeling guidelines.  Our Congress has even been exploring online privacy legislation that would set new boundaries for the collection of personal data by online advertisers.

Amidst all this change and heightened awareness, LucidMedia continues to take privacy seriously.  In fact, we were one of the very first demand-side platforms (DSP) to offer a real-time network opt-out on our homepage.  We are working with all of the leading privacy authorities to ensure we are employing the industry’s best practices when it comes to privacy.

When it comes to privacy, LucidMedia does not use any personally identifiable information (PII) and we do not work with partners who do employ PII.  We do not track or target specific or individual users online nor do we acquire data from providers who do track specific or individual users online.  We do not employ regenerating or FLASH tracking cookies.  Any cookie we do place is set to expire at no more than 90 days.  We use anonymous and general demographic data only, acquired through 3rd party providers or interpreted by our patented contextual engine, to improve the overall effectiveness of our campaigns.

You will find our corporate privacy policies available online at lucidmedia.com/legal.

Now that the “Google Content Network” has been magic-wanded into the “Google Display Network”, there is the potential for a lot more advertisers to come to the display party. But that party is hosted by a whole slew of acronyms. Here’s our quick and dirty guide to what they all mean:

CPM: Cost per thousand. This is your cost per thousand impressions, or the number of times your ad is viewed. A lot of display media is still bought this way.

DSP: Demand-side platform. Software used to purchase media across various ad networks and exchanges, generally with the use of third-party data and some sort of universal frequency cap to the number impressions any given consumer is shown.

RTB: Real-time bidding. Instead of buying a bunch of impressions from publishers and then auctioning them off, impressions are evaluating and purchased as they are generated.

BT: Behavioral targeting. The combination of learning from user behavior and third party data to more effectively target online advertising.

PBS: Preemptive brand safety. Some “brand safety” is really an after-the-impression assessment of potential appropriateness problems with the placement of an ad. Preemptive brand safety offers evaluation of the page prior to placing an ad there.

CPA: Cost per action. An act performed by a consumer in response to an ad, also the type of advertising that is sold on this basis. Also CPL (cost per lead) and CPD (cost per download).

RON: Run of network. Ads shown on all the web properties of any given publisher.

ROS: Run of site. Ads shown on just one specific website, though not on a specific page of that site.

IAB: Interactive Advertising Bureau. Group dedicated to the growth of interactive advertising and that also recommends standards and practices for online advertising.

NAI: Network Advertising Initiative. A group of third party network advertisers who are committed to increasing consumer confidence and contributing to the growth of electronic commerce.

RTA: Real Time Assessment. The ability to evaluate an impression in real-time for content, quality, and performance reasons before you buy or bid to lift efficiency and reduce the need for pass-backs.

ROI: Return on Investment. The calculation of revenue derived from spending on online advertisements. Also ROS (Return on Spend) and ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

So what did we miss? Define other acronyms in the comment section below!

There are all sorts of DSPs out there now. In fact, another company announced last week that it would be bringing a new DSP to market and there are already half a dozen major players in the space. So when it comes to choosing the right one for your business, how do you make a decision? If the three options below are important to you, you might be interested to know that no one besides LucidMedia has the capacity. And if you’re a current client, you might review this list anyway just to make sure you’re taking full advantage of our features.

Preemptive brand safety

So few DSPs can provide preemptive brand safety that skepticism about the possibility of it is rampant. The fact is that it is possible. In fact, it’s been done, but it requires a DSP with more than a UI and a handful of relationships with aggregators. In fact, it requires a robust, search engine like crawler partnered with proprietary semantic technology that not only identifies the true “about-ness” of every available impression, it also identifies potentially objectionable content. Preemptive brand safety isn’t simple and it isn’t easy and chances are, your DSP doesn’t have it.

Custom data integrations

Every reputable DSP has relationships with the big data suppliers like BlueKai, eXelate and AlmondNet. So do we. For most advertisers, buying data through our platform from one of these suppliers will be sufficient. But one advantage of starting out as a technology company is that we have brilliant engineers on staff. And our brilliant engineers do more than just build new features into our DSP. For large agencies and advertisers, we can also build custom data integrations so you can use your data within our DSP. You worked hard to collect and categorize, now we can help you put it to work.

Impression avails insight in real time

Real-time bidding has proven to be a powerful tool for many advertisers and most DSPs have access to real-time sources. The key to effective real-time bid management though is not only being able to buy in real time, but being able to make decisions about the value of impressions in real time before you buy. So when it comes to using data, either behavioral or contextual, our clients find our graphs of real time inventory availability for those segments exceptionally helpful. By turning different segments on and off, you can see what the impact to impressions, clicks and conversions could be. It’s an incredibly powerful forecasting tool that you just don’t see in other platforms.

These features won’t be important to every advertiser, but with the number of DSPs on the market now, it’s always nice to see what features are out there that your legacy DSP might be missing. Or if you haven’t selected a provider yet, the benefits you could be leaving on the table by continuing exclusively to work with networks or buy inventory directly from publishers. As you can see, a DSP is not just a new variation on an ad network or exchange, it’s a way to manage your display buying more efficiently.

If you’re an advertiser accustomed to purchasing inventory from individual publishers or publishers with groups of sites, working with a network, exchange or DSP is an entirely different ballgame. For one thing, you’ll be looking at information for thousands of sites instead of just one, two or a dozen. So questions like, “What are your site’s demographics?” are unlikely to yield useful information. It’s a new advertising world, one where you can give your preferred audience requirements to the network, exchange or DSP and they’ll deliver impressions to users who meet your requirements wherever they exist online.  This is instead of picking among several sites to see who has the best demographic profile and then hoping those users show up which is the way the direct buys work.  So in this brave new world of aggregated advertising with unlimited reach and scale, what questions should you ask when trying to select the right online advertising platform to manage your media buy so that you get the best return on your ad spend?

Can you apply a universal frequency cap?

If you’re working with a number of different networks simultaneously, it’s possible that your ad may delivered more than the maximum number of times to a single individual browser than is really optimal. Even premium publishers sell their remnant inventory on the exchanges so your ad could turn up for a single user from both sources more times than you would have planned if you’d had a choice. De-duping your media plan has historically been one of the big efficiency killers in display adverting and reach extension programs.  Managing your buy through a unified display advertising platform that allows for a universal frequency cap across all sources can help you reach your conversion goals in the most efficient manner.

What is the cost of the third party data you will be using to create my audience segments?

Unless a company has proprietary audience segments (which some do), they will most likely be purchasing data from a company like BlueKai, eXelate or AlmondNet. This data is not free, whether the company has a comprehensive agreement with one of the data companies that allows for the purchasing of data on platform or not. The cost will be built into the price somewhere and it may be beneficial to determine the cost of that data compared to a contextual system that targets specific keywords and key phrases or to a direct from publisher model that allows you to target certain sites or certain pages of sites.

Is the targeting used broad or narrow, optimized or fixed?

The direct buys were frequently limited in how much scale they could bring to the table.  You bought a site or a network of sites and your ads ran there, usually within a channel or two as a rudimentary form of “targeting”.  The new breed of aggregated campaigns can run as wide as the web so you need to stop and think about the approach, audience, content and scope of your campaign.  Do you want to reach a specific demographic trait like the lucrative A18 to 49?  Or is it more detailed like “Moms with Kids”?  Or do you want to run on certain kinds of content like golf equipment or hybrid SUVs?  These are fixed-type campaigns with a specific segment to reach.  Do you want to limit your campaign to only those requirements or do you want to run wider to make some serendipitous performance discoveries?  Running wide will often expose whole new pockets that perform for your brand.  We often see with our learning impressions that there are great performing segments, in audience and content and behavior, that can be exploited online to exceed goals.  These kinds of optimized campaigns run a parallel stream of wide learning media using an optimizer to maximize the learnings.  Then use your platform to scale the learnings to hit that perfect balance of pacing, price and performance.

The new frontier in advertising means asking a whole new breed of questions on how your buy will be put together. To ensure that you are getting the most return from your buy, make sure you’re asking the right kind of questions so you’re getting the kind of data you really need to succeed in a real-time world.

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.

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.

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.

As soon as Charter Communications voiced concerns about the controversial behavioral targeting issues, two other internet service providers (ISP) immediately distanced themselves from behavioral.  It has become the “hot potato” issue around targeting for internet advertising.  The privacy issues surrounding behavioral targeting are nothing new either and go back as far as 2005 or even earlier.  What I don’t understand is why organizations would even try to tackle this subject when there are great contextual targeting solutions out there that perform as well (or even better) than behavioral when it comes to performance lift for both direct response (DR) and brand advertisers.  Now don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-behavioral–far from it–but if the privacy issues rear their ugly head there is definitely a safe harbor from them in contextual.  Marketing Sherpa’s 2008 Online Advertising Handbook surveyed 577 online advertisers from a range of companies and found that 40.5% of the advertisers surveyed felt that contextual targeting yielded a higher ROI while only 36.7% preferred behavioral.  So while I’d prefer the industry found multiple ways to target for efficiency and performance, including unintrusive behavioral methods, which we certainly are doing, there has long been targeting solutions that completely side-step the subject of privacy.  Contextual is sublimely elegant in this aspect as it draws its relevance directly from the impression in real-time (at least our ClickSense approach does) to match the perfect ad to the user based on what they happen to be reading at the time.  This avoids saving any bits from the user’s historical actions yet serves up an even more relevant ad at a time when they are interested in learning more about the subject and they are most receptive to your message.  So if behavioral is got you down why not check out the contextual advertising solutions on the market today.  You won’t be sorry you did.