Yesterday’s ContextWeb/AdClub event which brought together NYC-area advertisers, publishers and traders has already yielded results in the form of a great blog post from MDC Partners/Varick Media Management‘s Darren Herman.
<Ripple dissolve to yesterday’s summary on AdExchanger.com> Toward the event’s close, Herman quizzed yesterday’s IPG/Publicis/OMG/WPP panel on how they are preparing their culture and employees for the coming changes in media buying as it leverages technology in order to improve efficiency for advertisers. </Ripple dissolve>
Today, Herman has offered a compelling treatise covering the rapidly-evolving demand-side with definitions (“What is a demand platform?”), identification of industry challenges, possible solutions for agency culture, typical pricing in the agency model, real-time b.s., and the final gem – a bulleted list called “The Agency Demand Platform Ecosystem.”
It’s like reading the agency version of “Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed.” AdExchanger.com says, “A must-read, 4 stars!”
In other news…
The downward plunge continues in the newspaper industry and Gannett is today’s poster child in the WSJ’s “Gannett Battles Ad Slump.”
FarneyMedia.com covers the AdMonsters event in the UK with “Ad Networks Talk Exchanges And Yield Optimization At Admonsters Event In London” as AdMeld and Rubicon Project are both active at the conference. AdMeld’s Ben Barokas tweets, “UK network forum going well, fantastic conversations with Ad Networks and Large Publishers.”
Greg Hills illustrates the complexities of optimization in his blog post, “Optimizing Beyond Click and Conversion.” Hills suggests that useful metrics for brand-conscious marketers could include ad exposure time, time spent on landing pages and visits to the advertiser’s home page. He adds:
“There will never be an algorithm to spit out innovative, memorable integrated marketing programs, but marketers still have the opportunity to use automation, optimization, and data to build brands.”
On the Burst Media blog, CEO Jarvis Coffin takes note of recent machinations at Interpublic who sees online advertising breaking out into three buckets (per Joe Mandese at MediaPost): Total Direct Response-based advertising, National Digital/Online advertising; and Local Digital/Online. Coffin says, “The sensible nature of Interpublic’s initiative is the desire to catalogue spending by marketing objective, not creative format, or application.”
Compete and Dynamic Logic have opened the kimono (yeah!) on a new partnership which measures ad effectiveness. Read the release here which mentions the fruits of the partnership – a product called AdIndex Connects:
“Now with “AdIndex Connects,” clients will be able to marry that knowledge with data from Compete, revealing how consumers search and engage on the Web following exposure to an ad. AdIndex Connects provides holistic insight of an online campaign, offering branding, sales and behavioral indicators of shorter-term and longer-term impact.”
Dynamic Logic and Compete will hold a webinar that highlights AdIndex Connect on July 29.
Do you love product development? Then, Eric Ries is your new best friend, in case you don’t already know him. He reviews “The Principles of Product Development,” a new book by Donald G. Reinertsen. His ringing endorsement includes “twelve cardinal sins” of product development.
- Failure to correctly quantify economics.
- Blindness to queues.
- Worship of efficiency.
- Hostility to variability.
- Worship of conformance.
- Institutionalization of large batch sizes.
- Underutilization of cadence.
- Managing timelines instead of queues.
- Absence of WIP constraints.
- Inflexibility.
- Noneconomic flow control.
- Centralized control.
Finally, Inside Facebook looks inside Facebook’s ad platform and its new features including Connection Targeting, Multiple Country and, our favorite, Birthday Targeting.