The Next Big Ad Market Compression

The more I think about attribution the more it leads down the road of connecting the ads with the true direct response vehicle. I’m not particularly talking about direct response advertising as it has evolved to today as that is really just optimization of the bottom of the funnel.

And contrarily brand marketing has still done a good job of keeping itself disconnected from direct response. So what would happen if you started cutting that branding budget and relying on just direct response advertising?

Or what if you cut the direct response dollars and just tracked all the brand impressions back to the direct response mechanisms i.e. call centers, sales people, and online commerce carts. We can do this. So why don’t we?

Well I have to give google credit. They passed up the brand dollars. In their earlier days they offered cpm advertising at the top of keywords. They later cut this out and moved over to an all cpc model.

Now we are seeing facebook doing this as well.

So these are the two biggest marketing vehicles of our recent history and they are passing up the branding dollars which could have a major backlash on our industry.

We already saw the compression of ad dollars when google swooped in and captured massive ad budgets. Well arguably they are getting the same results as when people would spend 10X what they spend on google on TV, Newspaper, and Magazines. Now Facebook is coming in and offering the best targeting our industry has ever seen and is passing up the brand dollars.

I think we will see another wave of ad dollar compression industry wide from the facebook price change backlash.

Also, I think it’s time for disruption at the big agencies and starting to use some of the tools that we have with ad servers, scoring, data warehouses, and call tracking to connect the brand dollars with the call centers, sales channels, and ecommerce carts.

Maybe a new smarter view thru metric will be the catalyst for this…..