Posts tagged onlineads

As I watch the Google Keynote on the future of display advertising that I posted yesterday for the first time, I’ll use this post to record my thoughts and reactions — a “tape delayed not so live blog” if you will.

• Google’s Watch this Space campaign is well done, well articulated and well thought out. It’s encouraging to see Google throw its considerable weight behind championing display media — in many ways, its a shame that they had to drag it into the position it currently is by not providing display context to search years ago. They did such a good job training the industry on search and making them rely on it blindly. Can they do the same for display?
• Display can be both Sexy and Smart — to this point the onus has been on the publisher to present both Sexy and Smart opportunities to marketers. The challenge should be for marketers to create Sexy and Smart that work across multiple publishers without requiring dramatic customization by any single marketer. That’s where display comes in. If IAB standard placements are the jumping off point and the display formats are accepted universally by publishers, custom programming is not as needed to create custom contextual ads. At the same time however, media buyers need to put more faith and currency into the display market instead of continually discounting it’s true value. 
• “The static ad banner will become a thing of the past,” said Salzman. “The golden age of display is right before us.”
• Prediction 1: It’s all about video. Users will need choice and control and advertisers will only pay for “viewed video”
• Cost per view is a huge notion for marketers — and is great for YouTube because of scale. This casts a shadow against smaller publishers who may not be able to offer skippable ad formats that aren’t monetized.
• Original video content is huge for publishers to get efficient at and good at. This is the platform against which these ads will show.
• Prediction 2: Real-time bidding will be 50% of the audience based market. Publishers need much better tools to understand their audience in a non-anonymous relationship.
• More important for me is real time creative from Teracent based on signals. Signals based on context within the publishers realm are huge in aligning relevance. Using other signals like weather or time of day, etc create a sense of familiarity with the creative upon site.
• Ads driven off of public content APIs should be much more mainstream but inconsistencies across APIs make it difficult to do at scale.
• Prediction 3: Mobile first. The mobile screen will be the first screen that users interact with ads —> think location based services right away.
• Using Google Goggles for media bridging is great for harvesting intrest with more detail.
• Augmented Reality can be used to enhance non-digital media to create depth of advertising content.
• Where does traditional display on the mobile device come in? I find it curious how that wasn’t mentioned. For me, I find it easy to ignore. The iAds platform is close to a good mobile ad platform, but until content that I want to engage with shows on it, I will continue to ignore.
• Prediction 4: 5 new metrics that will be more important than the click in measuring display campaigns. —> engagement, video views, view through conversions (been fighting this battle with advertisers for the better part of 8 years and media stacking with proper attribution to the compounded decision is more appropriate as a weighted average impact of each ad in a viewed campaign across the web), impact of display on search intent.  —> Sentiment analysis for virality and tone, including delta in tone over time, Geo based foot traffic or sales in local offline.
• Prediction 5: Social advertising —> in its infancy —> social should be ubiquitous and social —> share ad, comment on ad, feedback for ad —> should inform future display ads seen by user across the entire web. All ads will have a social layer to them to enable social activities (75% by 2015).
• Prediction 6: It’s all about rich media in ad + social —> live streaming of content into display ads. Real time tweeting and other social content into the ad unit. Are real time ads more relevant and interesting to users?
• Prediction 7: Display advertising will grow to a $50 billion dollar market in 2015. — currently $23 billion in 2009.