Mobtown Labs

A good friend of mine and former Ad.com and AOL colleague, Greg Skipper, has been working on a startup. It’s a really cool app that they describe as a personal concierge service.  Basically you find yourself in a new city (or even your own neighborhood) and you open the app on your mobile device and it recommends things that are going on around you and as you choose things it learns more of what you like i.e. I don’t care for sports so the more I pick non-sports related events the less it recommends sporting events.

Obviously, the success of this depends on the accuracy of the app learning what you like but so far I’ve been impressed.  I also think the business model around this to possibly integrate with the daily deal world or start connecting individuals and start mobile tribes of recommendations for like minded people could be really cool and lucrative for the Brom.ly team

Here are links so you can try out the app:

o   http://brom.ly

o   http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/brom-ly/id444067080

o   https://market.android.com/details?id=ly.brom

Here is some great press about them:

• http://www.new-startups.com/internet/brom-ly/
• http://mashable.com/2011/07/23/discovery-tools/ 
•  http://www.betabeat.com/2011/07/29/brom-ly-is-building-the-ultimate-event-engine/

Image via Wikipedia

I came across a post by Brad Terrell talking about the Appnexus Innovation summit and he highlights the topic of targeting sites vs. targeting audiences.

He goes on to talk about two different ad networks, their differences and gives emerical evidence of his thoughts:

Adam also illustrated the value creation potential of the audience-driven approach to targeting by pointing out how the enterprise value of a representative “old school” ad network, Burst Media, paled in comparison to the much higher enterprise value of a newer “audience-driven” ad network, interCLICK

 - Please read the whole post as this could be considered out of context and its worth reading the whole post http://loca.ly/couk6j

So I think about this from a entrepreneur’s perspective and I completely agree.  Advertisers and Marketers cling to what is new and there is continual pressure to do a better job and take advantage of the newest technologies and methods possible.

That said, DON’T OVERLOOK SITE TARGETING.  Audience targeting if done properly with re-targeting or search keyword re-targeting such as with Magnetic.is can be very powerful and literally spin gold when it comes to bottom of the funnel and making sure you get in-market sales.  

Beyond this however lies the ocean of ad impressions that are still being boiled by the likes of the big ad networks and exchanges.  I recently had a conversation with the VP of Operations at one of the larges online ad agencies pitching my business and knowing that I used to sell to him I asked, well what do you think I should be buying.  He responded, that when you are doing direct response advertising where you need to hit a specific ROI to continue to invest, what you do is buy all of the ad networks and optimize the best you can.  He said DSP’s are great for getting that re-targeting audience and a couple other segments but largely a lot of the audiences do not work and there are so many of them that even if there is an optimal audience, you will waste a lot of money trying to find it.

From my experience on the sales side on any given campaign there were 2-3 audiences that really worked on any given campaign (one being re-targeting) and the rest of the heavy lifting was done by site optimization and frequency within site optimization.  In fact the most important driver is something that I rarely hear people selling on or creating business models on, which is site frequency and the fact that the first few impressions (1-3) are in fact the most valuable by a long shot.  Most publishers know this and technology lends to selling this easily but for some reason it is not sold out there on the open market.

Furthermore there is also a lot of evidence that brand name new sites and mail sites such as LA Times, NY Times, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and others similar create the most ROI impact if bought at the right frequency and attributed properly…..which leads to attribution modeling which is a whole other post which I probably need to write more on.  That said, if bought through an ad network or exchange often you get the higher site-frequency impressions and these sites don’t appear to work as well.  If bought directly, you have the burden of paperwork and exorbitantly high prices to get access to the right impressions of this media.

So because they have such a broad view of their buys I think a great new frontier for ad networks SSP’s, and DSP’s is to sell based on site-frequency.  They have this data and often know where they are in the publisher daisy chain and can aggregate supply across many sites and can efficiently convert this into a fluid buy.  

And, I would buy it…..

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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…….

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Working in the online ad space we like to fantasize that we are head and shoulders above the TV, Newspaper, and Radio ad world (collectively known as ‘offline’).

That said we still conform to their old processes.  Why do we budget, RFP, issue insertion orders all on paper and on a monthly or quarterly basis?  This is all hinges on the old way of doing things which was rooted in the fact that it takes a day to write up and print a daily newspaper and a week to curate, edit, and print a sunday edition newspaper.

The same goes for TV.  TV is on a standard programming schedule that would need to be disclosed out to the TV Guides of the world in order to get viewers.  Then the ratings would come out on a similar time period.

Now we are dealing with Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, blogs…..all real-time.  Even web 1.0 like yahoo and aol’s homepage are published in realtime with updating links and stories and customizable designs.

To replace ratings we have Google Analytics, Omniture, Chartbeat and various other analytics tools that give you indications of how your advertising is doing in near-realtime or in some cases truly realtime.

So why are we still stuck on this Insertion Order, RFP, Monthly, Quarterly, and upfront buying cycle??

Somehow google circumvented this [I guess because the results are so astounding] and get advertisers to just allocate a certain budget to search and advertisers are comfortable changing bids and adjusting budgets and pricing and their ads on the fly.

This needs to happen for the rest of online…..or at least social media.

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