Albert Thompson will be speaking at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference on Sept. 24-25 in New York City. Click here to register.
The rise of attention metrics heralds digital marketing’s long-overdue pivot back to basic human behavior, says Albert Thompson, Managing Director, Digital, at the ad agency Walton Isaacson, and a buy-side veteran with more than 20 years of experience.
“The war is really for attention,” Thompson says. “It’s not for clicks, viewability or all these other media metrics we’ve made up.”
Instead of being used as a replacement for a given metric, Thompson says attention measurement can be a welcome departure from “creating technologies, tools and tactics that teach you nothing about the consumer,” while chasing cheap impressions.
“If we were really innovating, we would have gone to attention years ago,” he adds. “Proper attention moves way past viewability and safety, because you’re reaching people who actually care.”
Thompson spoke to AdExchanger about made-for-advertising (MFA) sites, brand safety and how publishers can improve their inventory.
AdExchanger: Are MFA sites as bad as they’re cracked up to be?
ALBERT THOMPSON: Depends on your business model.
For a high-intent audience, like pharmaceutical, MFA doesn’t work. The behavioral science of breaking down your conditioning until you finally decide to get help doesn’t work for MFA environments. But MFA very much works for Temu getting people to buy cheap jewelry.
Viewability is often blamed for media quality controversies like MFA. Do you agree?
I blame MFA on brands leaving machines unattended.
We’ve gotten so lazy and let the algorithms figure out where to spend. If you send a kid to buy apples, he’s going to buy the cheapest crap, especially if he gets to keep the money he doesn’t spend.
Viewability is not a metric of whether I gave a damn. The potential to be viewed does not mean potentially consumed. So it’s a crappy metric. You don’t want ads that aren’t in view, but that’s table stakes. I don’t know how marketers allowed agencies and tech stacks to get away with making them pay to measure viewability.
How can programmatic auctions run more fairly?
People invest too much time in the auction conversation. If you live and die by bidding, you’re not living and dying by high-intent consumers who drive outcomes. People who stay with a brand 20 years aren’t biddable. You have to earn that.
Bidding strategy is to game the machine and make more profit, which has nothing to do with my outcomes [as a marketer], and everything to do with yours [as a tech vendor]. DSPs playing the bidding game reward the things they’re trying to protect the client from: MFA, clickbait and high-churn, cheap-cost sites.
What do you think of the politicized backlash to brand safety, framing brand safety as a threat to free speech?
There’s some truth in it. A lot of brand safety is an overshot, and there’s collateral damage.
One blocklist I’ve seen has the entire country of Spain blocked – thousands of domains. The way these platforms go about it is by over-policing. Where over-policing becomes a problem, the populous starts to fight back. But policing is a revenue driver.
What are the effects of this over-policing on publishers?
Culture is turned off. The people who created the machines – mostly white Americans – don’t understand Black, Latino, queer, Asian, indigenous, you name it, culture. That’s not their fault, but they’re the ones programming the machines.
For example, the publisher Revolt that Diddy helped launch – it’s blocked. Not because of Diddy’s court case. Because the word “revolt” is on a blocklist.
The lack of semantic intelligence is a killer. You have to be very intentional in building a website. Forget keyword layering and search engine optimization. You have to build content around blocking in a way that’s so unrealistic that you can’t stay true to the narrative.
Is using AI to parse sentiment and context a better approach?
If the consumer is on [a site or app that matters to them], the advertiser is in a safe space to connect with them. DV360, The Trade Desk, whoever, doesn’t get to discern that’s not safe.
You want AI to give you a line of sight you don’t have. AI code on page says this page matters. Run that ad there to get that person to convert. AI is going to cut a lot of middlemen and costs out by giving [buyers] a direct signal.
We’ve also seen a backlash against progressive ad industry priorities like DEI, sustainability, and demonetizing misinformation, with advertisers often backing down from their stated principals in response to pressure campaigns. Does that surprise you?
Advertising is not a business built on confidence. You hear marketers standing behind things like DEI. But you don’t hear agencies, because they may find a client that leans the other way, so they’re trying to stay bipartisan. But it’s BS. It’s a liberal industry.
Only marketers can fix this. Agencies are too insecure about clients moving money.
In a recent interview with AdMonsters, you said publishers should own their value for vertical or niche advertisers, rather than trying to make top 100 publisher lists. How do publishers do that?
Publishers need to get savvier in matching the consumption of their editorial to purchase behaviors in specific categories.
“We’re getting auto insertions.” Are your readers electric-vehicle or internal-combustion-engine people? “We match well with the pharmaceutical industry.” The drug side or consumer health side?
Start mapping that intelligence.
The future of publisher success is verticalized expertise. The top 100 says we do it all. But the long tail is where things get matched up.
What business models should publishers follow?
Publishers wonder why they can’t grow. “Why can’t we get more insurance advertisers?” Because your content doesn’t match with them, so they put a ceiling on you to spend no more than $X until there’s a better contextual match.
Why wouldn’t you have automotive and home verticals? These are the two biggest purchase categories.
Do we need to return to the portal days where you’re a mega site? Probably not. Should everyone act like a Condé Nast? Absolutely.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
For more articles featuring Albert Thompson, click here.
