Mobtown Labs

TV vs. Online Video - It’s the Same thing

Today I read an article on SAI about how Online video that was re-posted from Dave Rayburn’s Streamingmedia.com. The article inferred that online video will not replace TV in the near future because Akamai finally released some numbers on the actual number of live video streams during the World Cup and the numbers were underwhelming.

My thoughts are that there are some systematic problems with online video but this should not be confused with consumer demand for it.

Online video is pre-mature because of a couple things. First of all you can’t get a decent stream. Now this could be the CDN’s fault, the ISP’s fault for throttling bandwidth, or the content provider’s fault for purposefully not investing in decent quality video through the internet channels. But the truth is it goes through the same line so it’s more of a business decision rather than a technical limitation.

The counter argument of, well people prefer to watch things on TV….. I’m not buying it. Cable TV’s menu user experience is terrible. Boxee, Apple TV, Hulu, Netflix, every one of them has a better UI, more selection and better customer experiences. Also, now any computer can be plugged into a TV with an HDMI cable and give excellent picture and an iPhone or Droid can be used as the remote, so saying people prefer TV is just wrong.

Just like everything else in media it’s tied to advertising and the attribution model. TV has a great racket going on for commercial spots. The fact that you buy on a spot basis or TRP or GRP measurement basis is just silly. The technology is there to buy and track it better, content providers, ISP’s and CDN’s are just choosing not to do it. Right now they have created a similar setup to homepages online.

The truth is Cable TV could be bought like exchange display advertising and the diversity and segmentation that’s going on in display will bring in a flood of new advertisers and faster moving transactions and I also believe competition will be driven up for the premium spot buys for national premier series like American Idol spots much like Yahoo’s homepage in Q4.

Right now companies like TidalTV and Simulmedia are working on solutions for this but don’t yet have access to do the transactions and sales (to my knowledge). I look forward to this opening up, but I’m not waiting for them.

Attribution can be done on Cable TV right now and we will begin modeling it out in coming months and I look forward to integrating this attribution model with online.

Akamai Says Internet Demand for World Cup Viewing Doubled over 2006 (beet.tv)
The Boxee Box is Un-Boxed [VIDEO] (mashable.com)
World Cup Streaming Numbers Show Online Video Not Replacing TV (streamingmedia.com)
Panache Partners with Industry Innovators in The Rising Tide Co-Op to Deliver Superior Advertising Models to Publishers (eon.businesswire.com)

Tags: Cable television Television Apple Yahoo Streaming media Hulu Advertising attribution

Comments

Attribution’s effect on The Ad Market - Demand Side

Image via Wikipedia

This is a continuation of my post on Friday discussing how the Supply side was affected by attribution modeling and, though I’m confident it will be a good thing for the ad market because I think online ads sell for too cheap these days, I can see how publishers are worried and advertisers could be too opportunistic. That said let’s examine the Demand Side.

Supply = Publishers (Friday’s Post)

Demand = Advertisers (This Post)

Demand

Attribution modeling is truly an Advertisers dream. Many publishers attempt to offer it like Doubleclick and Atlas’ Engagement mapping or the Advertising.com custom data mining offerings but there are inherent flaws because data is limited, the whole puzzle isn’t visible to the publisher, or advertisers are just skeptical that there could be a conflict of interest in that they are just trying to sell you more advertising.

Every marketer’s job is to buy advertising and make creative and then align the cost of doing so in an attempt to make it drastically cheaper to acquire new customers than what you are charging the customer. The problem with this is that without a solid attribution model, you never truly know what piece of media and creative is actually driving that customer. Furthermore it rarely is just one ad impression so the question becomes what combination of media over what time period (and what time interval) is the most cost efficient.

Couple that with the fact that you either need to pay for each individual ad (like a homepage) or you pay for a result and you have no control over or have no way to track how and when the ads were shown (like a pay per click search text link) and you have quite a messy scenario.

So in the grand scheme of things there is only upside for the advertiser with attribution modeling but there is a major philosophical flaw. Most marketers if they look at their marketing plan have customers that they think are for free. Natural search traffic, organic traffic to your site, customers walking in or calling in and just buying a product.

So I will be bold enough to lay down the Cardinal Rules of Attribution Modeling:

1. There is no such thing as free traffic

2. There is no such thing as a free customer

3. If you have free traffic and free customers, your attribution model is BROKEN.

I will end with a ridiculous scenario and prediction. I personally think that the demand side of attribution modeling could be the fix to ad market growth and economic growth. The reality is that we are doing less work and incurring less costs to acquire new customers, so therefore companies like Amazon, Google, and Yahoo can deliver sales to customers at a much lower overhead than newspaper, TV, and radio have done in the past. This concentrates dollars in marketplace pricing scenarios and those dollars are then compressed because these businesses use their low TAC to offer low ad prices.

Based on economic principles alone, if every advertiser knew what ads truly drove their sales right now, they would double down their ad dollars. That would double the ad market and pump twice as much money back into our economy and all problems would be solved. THE END!

Get Ready for the Coming Land War in Online Display Ads (adage.com)
Search Advertising (slideshare.net)
Awesome Map Of The Digital Display Advertising Tech Marketplace (adbean.net)
The rise of RTB and our investment in Triggit (sethlevine.com)

Tags: Google Advertising Online advertising Marketing Yahoo Doubleclick Pay per click Web Design and Development

Comments

Taking the High Road on Attribution Modeling

Image by AWWS via Flickr

A year or two ago you started to see a lot of buzz in the marketplace about attribution modeling and analytics. Atlas and Doubleclick started coming out with products they called “Engagement Mapping” and agencies and marketers dug in! Finally someone would try to crack the nut of the age old question by John Wannamker:

“I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half. ”

So what ever happened with this?

You really don’t hear too much talk about Engagement Mapping anymore. Everything is more about “Audiences on Demand” or “Reatlime Bidding” or owning your own data warehouse and retargeting audiences.

Is this because people did the Engagement Mapping and figured out their attribution model and found the ‘half’ that is not a waste and is trying to buy that at the cheapest rate possible?

I don’t think so. What I think happened is that we started to dig into the Engagement Mapping and Attribution model tools and first of all realized warehousing all of that data and keeping it and analyzing it over the long term proved to be incredibly expensive, incredibly cumbersome to compute and quickly access and the Engagement Mapping product could not be easily productized and made into a nimble nicely packaged tool where marketers and agencies could quickly make changes and show results, they bagged it and went for the next best thing.

Essentially they took the high road on Attribution Modeling. Realtime Bidding and targeting audiences essentially productized and made Demand Side Platforms able to quickly and nimbly scale the ‘stuff that works’.

To better explain lets go back to John Wannamaker. He said that he knows half of his ad spend doesn’t work. Well we have come a long way and with technology now we are down to knowing that half of our ad spend doesn’t work, about 5-10% of our ad spend definitely does work and we can really do a lot of work and gain a lot of efficiencies in that 5-10% and I think that’s what DSP’s and a lot of the data targeting is doing.

Retargeting we know is a gold mine and for large advertisers, it’s reasonably scaleable. We also know that search data from companies like Magnetic.is is really valuable but we’re still finding out how to scale that and which keywords and from what sources will that work from.

These are great findings and our industry and marketers are much better served by knowing that these audiences are some new more robust pillars to stand on.

That said there is a whole lot more and I think we quit too early and there is a lot more innovation to do on Attribution Modeling. The data is there, the capabilities are there, it just needs to be figured out and the technology needs to be optimized because right now even with hadoop, cassandra, cascading, and some of the methods the guys at Flightcaster are using, data is still not normalized enough and inexpensively scalable enough. Also, the big dollars are being spent on the media company side (i.e. google, yahoo, AOL) and not on the advertiser or agency side because those dollars don’t exist.

I think as agencies expand their margins and as the DSP and Data space starts to cool and consolidate the next frontier will be Demand Side Attribution Model Software or DSAS or DeSAMoS or DemSAMoSo or maybe someone else can work on a cool acronym while I work on the product…….