How Behavioral Targeting Misbehaves

The other day I went to the website of a men’s clothing store. I wasn’t interested in buying anything. I just wanted to find out some information about the company.

That was three days ago.

For three days now, I’ve been inundated with nothing but ads for this company wherever I go online.

Before I visited their site, I didn’t even know they did digital advertising.

I do now.

I wish they didn’t. The fact is, after seeing nothing but their advertising online for three days, I now find the store to be quite irritating.

All the money the advertiser spent to run the the advertising has convinced me of only one thing. Never shop there.

And therein lies the problem with behavioral targeting. Because there isn’t enough advertising created for online use, what there is becomes over-used. Which in turn, makes it irritating rather than welcomed.

Of course, making advertising welcomed is what behavioral targeting is supposed to be all about. The promise of only delivering ads about products that your online behavior indicates that you should be interested in sounds good in theory.

But, in practice, it’s another story.

It’s not that I don’t visit sites other than men’s clothing stores. It’s just that those sites don’t have advertising ready to go where I go.

So instead I get one ad, over and over and over.

At this point, I’d rather be getting ads about products that I’m not interested in.

No, I won’t buy those products either. But at least my irritation would have some variety.

To Engage With The Future Requires Us To First Disengage From The Thinking Of The Past

Everyone seems to be claiming that advertising is broken. Especially in the way that we buy and sell it.

With impressions fragmenting, CPM no longer seems to hold the allure it once did. Cost-per-click, cost-per-sale, click-thru-rate, all have their negatives.

Reach and frequency is a legacy of a one-way medium. If, as some will argue, the point of advertising is engagement, then the current forms of payment based on clicks and impressions fall short.

The problem seems to be that we are hoping to operate 21^st century marketing platforms under 20^th century compensation models. Or, as Marshall McLuhan put it so succinctly, we now find ourselves “marching backwards into the future.”

Dysfunctional?

To be sure. But what is needed to institute change?

The key, at least in my opinion, lies in coming to the realization that it’s not about media or creative anymore.

What it’s about is data.

If so, it should make publishers very happy. After all, the data is theirs to sell.

Instead of contracting with advertisers to deliver audience, measured as impressions, why don’t publishers contract to deliver data? Ten days worth, 20 days worth, 30 days worth, corresponding to how long the creative runs.

Instead of a two-week buy delivering “X” amount of impressions, why not a two-week buy offering “X” amount of data?

Each piece of data, be it impressions, click-through rate, time spent with the commercial, forwarded to a friend, etc. could all be for sale. The more data requested by the advertiser, the more it will cost for that two-week run.

Would advertisers be interested?

You bet.

The reason is that advertisers today are rapidly trying to find ways to shift to performance-based compensation models with their agencies. Performance is what data measures. Performance, not audience, is what publishers should be selling.

Today, publishers give most of this data away for the cost of 2 cents per impression ($20 CPM). In other words, they are giving the valuable stuff away for free, while charging for what most no longer find value in.

Unfortunately, as impressions continue to fragment, they’ll need to raise the cost per impression. Which will only serve to drive advertisers even further away.

Once in this vicious vortex of self-destruction, survival is questionable.

Strategies For Survival In A Time Of Change

Publishers need to transition their strategies to be more compatible with the needs of advertisers in the digital marketplace. Advertisers want to pay based on performance. Every data point offers a measurement of performance.

To an advertiser, what is measurable is pleasurable. The reason? What can be measured can be monetized.

Which means any and all pieces of data can not only be used to help plan the next media buy and creative execution, but also, to help pay for the present media buy and creative execution.

After all, while data makes actions transparent, it also serves to make media and creative agencies accountable.

To be able to offer advertisers accountability, as well as audience, can only make publishers more valuable.

Turning data into dollars is how publishers can best engage with future.

If, of course, they can first disengage from the thinking of the past.

The Ad Unit Is Only As Effective As The Ad

You have to love media agencies.

Basically, they’re in the distribution business. But, truth be told, they really want to be in the creative business.

God bless ‘em.

Plumbers who want to be poets.

Even the names that they’re giving their new divisions are becoming more creative. Take Vivaki, for instance. It doesn’t seem to matter to The Starcom Mediavest Group that nobody can pronounce it correctly the first time they see it. Or, that they need to include a phonetic spelling next to the name on their website.

To them, it’s creative.

Interestingly enough, Vivaki is now testing what they believe could be today’s most effective video ad format for creative.

Format, mind you. Not commercial. Format. As if how the commercial is crafted is irrelevant to the commercial's effectiveness.

Alan Schulman, a genius when it comes to digital creative, was the creative lead on this Vivaki initiative. He wrote a nice piece about how it’s not the plumbing but the poetry that makes a commercial work, or not work.

Alan believes that good creative has to make you feel, not just think.

Alan, as usual, is bang on.

Hopefully, since he was involved in this Vivaki process, this ultimate video ad format will be able to be evaluated on how well it allows "viewsers" (Alan’s word) to feel.

Of course, Vivaki will no doubt charge advertisers the same amount for this new video ad format whether anybody feels anything or not.

Which should leave advertisers feeling as if they’ve been ripped off.

After all, I’m assuming that this new video ad format, like all video ad formats today, will be able to offer advertisers data as to how well the commercial was able to hold a viewer’s attention.

Will Vivaki charge advertisers for this new format based on these view duration metrics? In other words, the longer viewers watch the commercial for, the more Vivaki can charge.

It's difficult to argue that the longer viewers are engaged in a commercial, the greater the chances are that they’ll be persuaded to buy the product.

Or, according to Alan, to feel something.

So is it Vivaki’s new video ad format that is responsible for more time being spent with the commercial itself? Or, is it the skill of the creatives who crafted the commercial?

I’m guessing that Vivaki will initially take the credit. Until, that is, advertisers ask if they can pay Vivaki based on time spent, i.e., results.

At which point, Vivaki will back down, claiming that they’re in the plumbing business after all. Someone else makes the actual shit.

It seems to me that no matter what number people want to put on advertising, 1.0, 2.0, 20.0, 300.0, one basic principle remains the same.

It’s the creative idea that makes a media format work. Not the other way around.

Which means, Vivaki, you’re still in the plumbing business.

No matter how creative your name is.

(By the way, it’s viva-key. Had it wrong, did you?)

Who's Responsible For Being Dugg On Digg?

I think Digg is on to something by allowing its community to vote on the worthiness of a commercial.

With Digg Ads, the more an ad or commercial is dugg on Digg, the less an advertiser will have to pay to run the commercial. Conversely, the less the commercial is dugg on Digg, the deeper the advertiser will need to dig into its pocket to run the ad.

It’s a nice idea. But, I feel that it is rewarding the wrong group of people.

As it works now, Digg is allowing any steller efforts by the creative agency to pay off in lower media costs.

In my opinion, having a commercial dugg on Digg should lead to the creative agency being rewarded. The more the work is dugg, the more the creative agency should make. The less the work is dugg, the less the agency should be able to put in its pocket.

Of course, viewers’ opinions of commercials are voted on every day across the digital platform, not just on Digg.

Viewers vote through the amount of time they spend with the commercial. If they watch thirty out of thirty seconds, it’s a good indication that they have dugg the commercial. If they watch only five out of thirty seconds, then no, they haven't dugg the commercial.

View duration data for commercials offers advertisers the ability to start paying for creative on a performance basis. Performance, in this case, being the amount of time viewers choose to spend with the commercial.

Kudos to Digg for being one of the first to allow viewer behavior to affect cost.

Now, if they would only reward those who are actually accountable for being dugg.

There Will Be Full Transparency Of Commercial Performance In The Digital World. Oh, Oh.

The last thing I would want to be in the digital world is a marketing director. The reason is the headline above.

And tomorrow brings us one step closer to, as Joe Mandese of MediaPost calls it, D-Day.

For the first time in the history of advertising, marketing directors will have no place to hide and no one to blame. Fingers, my friend, are going to be pointed. And, I’m afraid, unless you move fast; they are going to be pointed at you.

There are three questions you need to answer, and answer quickly, if you’re a marketing director.

1. Now that you can know exactly if your commercials are being viewed or not, do you really want to?

As they say, knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Once you start finding out that viewers only watch say, 10% of your commercial, what are you going to do with that information?

Besides trying to hide it from your boss.

In the past, we never really knew whether the commercials that ran were actually viewed or not. That innocence is quickly being shattered. The problem is that you, as marketing director, approved the commercial. Which makes you directly accountable.

Unless again, you move quickly.

2. How can you best pass the blame?

Don’t try blaming it on your media agency. As much as they will take credit, and expect extra payment, if the viewing data is positive, if it’s negative, well, they’re going to say that they can’t be held responsible for creative. Once people click in to watch, they will say, it’s the responsibility of the creative agency.

Will your creative agency take responsibility?

After the fact, hell no. They’ll claim that there was too much client input during the production of the spot for them to be held accountable for how well it actually worked at involving people.

If you want to hold your agency accountable, then your best bet is to get them to agree to that beforehand.

Which leads to question number three.

3. How Do You Get Your Agency To Agree To Be Held Accountable For Commercial Performance?

It starts by noticing that we didn’t say “sales performance.” We said “commercial performance.” That's very different and something that your agency actually has full control over.

By commercial performance, we simply mean this. Of those that clicked-in to start watching, did they watch a.) All of the commercial, b.) Some of the commercial, or c.) None of the commercial.

Of course, (a) is the answer you want. To make your creative agency accountable for delivering (a) then you need to reward them well for doing so.

In other words, you'll need to make the cost of coming up with the concept and the production of the commercial partially dependent on how long viewers watch the commercial for.

The longer the agency gets viewers to watch, the more the agency makes. Of course, you as marketing director will have to give them more creative leeway. Once you approve the script, back off. Let them do what they do.

After all, the interests of both parties are pretty much aligned now. You both will want viewers to watch more rather than less. When they do, you'll look good to your boss. And, the creative team will look to their CFO.

Can this be done? Certainly. There are a couple of models out there designed to work exactly this way.

Choose the one you like, or, start looking for ways to pass the buck.

Because I'm afraid that full transparency is here to stay.

Which means you run, yes. But hide?

'Fraid not.

A New Definition Of Value

Tim Williams of Ignition, wrote an interesting piece regarding procurement in Advertising Age this week.

Tim’s a big proponent of value-based compensation. He believes that the more value the agency delivers, the more the agency should be compensated.

Difficult to argue with that.

The key to procurement, at least according to Tim, is the “alignment of incentives.” By this he means aligning desired outcomes by tying compensation to value created rather than costs incurred, and the sharing of risk and reward between advertiser and agency.

Noble goals, all.

Attainable or not, is another story.

The biggest difficulty, at least in my opinion, comes in defining value. The term has proven to be rather subjective. The advertiser has one definition. The agency has another.

Both definitions tend to be completely self-serving, to say the least.

Which is why it's probably best to let someone else define value. I don’t know, but since advertisers are talking to consumers with the commercials they run, perhaps consumers should be the ones to say whether a commercial has value or not.

What makes it even easier is that consumers don’t actually have to say anything at all. Digital data says it all for them.

If a consumer clicks-in to watch a commercial—in other words, expressing an initial interest—but then clicks-out within five seconds, well, it’s obvious that the commercial didn’t hold enough value for them to hang around.

What's interesting about time spent with a commercial is that it’s directly measurable. Which makes time spent the one measure of value that is not subjective.

And which is why view duration data could start to serve as an interesting alternative to procurement.

The role of most procurement agents is to reduce the amount the agency spends, especially in regards to production. In other words, their job is to stop money from going out the door. Whether it hurts the quality of the final product, i.e., commercial, is really not the procurement agent’s focus.

But it should be the focus of the marketing director. Those dollars he or she is subtracting have a direct bearing on how well the commercial will, or will not, strike the emotional chords necessary for success.

By using digital data that reveals how long viewers did, or did not, engage with the commercial, marketers can pay based on the actual value delivered.

At least, value as defined by the consumer.

If the results show that nobody hung around very long, then the agency won’t make very much. On the other hand, if the agency did keep the viewer’s interest and attention, they can, and should, be paid very well.

It’s the difference between rewarding value-creation versus cost-cutting.

Which should appeal to both marketers and agencies alike.

After all, if you’re a marketer that values creative brilliance, there’s now a way to let creative brilliance define value.

Another Convert To Time Spent As The Metric Of Choice

As you may have noticed, we occasionally use this space to introduce new converts to time spent and its rightful place in the field of advertising.

A lot of you may already know Cory Treffiletti. His most recent thoughts on time spent can be found here.

Enjoy.

Have Advertisers Really Lost Control?

There seems to be a lot of blathering on these days (including this blog) about how consumers are taking control over what they watch and when.

Most blatherers claim that there is a direct correlation between the control the consumer has gained and the control the advertiser has lost.

I don’t see it that way.

The reason is simply because there are more then two groups — consumers and advertisers — in the equation. Once you add in the creative agencies that create the ads, the media agencies that place the ads and the media that runs the ads, then the final answer as to who has lost control and who has gained it, changes completely.

It's not simply a one-to-one correlation.

The key is to remember that in the digital marketplace, as the consumer gains control, the advertiser gains knowledge. This is due to the return path capabilities of the digital platform. Yes, digital technology gives consumers the chance to skip commercials and watch what they want when they want.

But at the same time, it gives the advertisers exact information as to who is doing what.

So, advertisers know if people actually watch the commercials they are exposed to or not. What’s more, they know how many of the thirty seconds that they paid good money to have produced and to be watched are actually watched.

With knowledge comes power. For the longest time, advertisers have misused that power, thinking that the knowledge they gained over what consumers were doing could be and should be used against the consumer. “Oh,” the logic went, “now that we know that they’re skipping ads, let’s find a way to prevent them from skipping ads.”

This always seemed, at least to me, to be a perfectly good waste of time and resources.

The only way advertisers can regain control is to give the consumer complete control. And then, use the knowledge gained from the consumers' actions to financially control the others in the equation – creative agencies, media agencies and media.

A type of control the advertiser hasn’t enjoyed since the start of advertising.

For the first time ever, advertisers know how many of their exposures turn into actual interest on the part of the consumer. Or, not. They know how much of their thirty second commercials are actually being watched by the consumer. Or, not.

In other words, they now know how much of their budget is actually being wasted. Or, not.

You would think that this sort of information would embolden advertisers. Instead, it seems to have petrified them. Perhaps they’re just in a state of shock to find out that it’s so much more than just half of their advertising that isn’t working.

Reality is often difficult to accept.

It was once said that to be successful, you must see reality as it really is. Not as you would like it to be.

The digital data that is available today allows advertisers to see reality as it really is.

If advertisers aren’t looking at the data and holding their media and creative agencies accountable for consumers avoiding their advertising, they have only themselves to blame.

Not the consumer.

After all, by giving the consumer control, the advertiser has received a gift. The gift of knowledge.

Whether, and how they use it, is still to be determined.