Comments on: Advertising to Audiences

By: Steph Inglis

Steph Inglis — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:43:35 +0000

Great read. I agree that data is invaluable in our industry, especially when considering ROI and general accountability. I’ve been working with Buy Safe Media (www.buysafemedia.com), a campaign that promotes print media circulation audits. It represents another way to reach your target audience. Check it out and let me know what you think.

By: jehutson.com - Life and Technology Musings from Jamie Hutson » Blog Archive » Fake Internet Money

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:28:29 +0000

[...] the same ad dollars (Zvents, outside.in, and many more). I’m not the only one who warns of seeking the same ad dollars with similar [...]

By: Darren Herman - Marketing, Advertising, Media and Technology Blog » Blog Archive » Y Combinator Advertising Startups

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:59:11 +0000

[...] that the next iteration of advertising is going to involve a wealth of data. I talk about it here. And here. Moving from assumptions to precise targeting is going to be very fruitful for all [...]

By: Darren Herman - Marketing, Advertising, Media and Technology Blog » Blog Archive » The End of Theory: I data

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:38:24 +0000

[...] data sets and applying them to problems. On the 16th of June, I posted a lengthy blog post about Advertising to Audiences. I believe this post sets the tone for advertising theory moving forward. The most important [...]

By: Pete Spande

Pete Spande — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 20:17:20 +0000

Great post. As you get more efficient with your targeting, the industry will require a very different method of pricing these opportunities. CPMs will either be tremendously high – what is the CPM on 1000 people with net worth of $10mm? or will some other pricing fromat take hold?

Also wonder about the relationship between context and audience. Golf tournaments on TV are sponsored by people looking to reach executives and high net worth individuals. Golf sites typically carry ads for golf equipment. TV and some network/behavioral firms seem to focus on audience with many web properties (and google ad sense and ad words) focus on context. You can target the right audience but is that message effective when the context is wrong?

Very exciting times.

By: Darren

Darren — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 03:03:10 +0000

Thank you all for the great comments. Everyone brings up some really interesting points.

Sean, I’d love to speak to your questions….

1) Is it important to segment audience and behavior data? Yes and no. Data works nicely in aggregate for overall trends, but when you start slicing it, it becomes extremely interesting. Since there are two main types of campaigns you can run (brand vs. conversion), you may use different audiences/data to optimize and target.

2) Creative certainly plays into a restriction here. Ideally, you’d have a different creative message for each placement (site/placement level) but most of the time it doesn’t happen due to many constrictions. We don’t live in a perfect world

By: Michael J. Pratt

Michael J. Pratt — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:40:36 +0000

Darren – One of your best posts yet. Sites that are fortunate enough to already have data on users (subscription, etc) ought to realize they have a head start and companies you mention like Lotame should be working with them to (at least) perfectly target the ads served while those users are logged in. You’d think Facebook would have this perfected, given you have to be logged in (and they have access to so much of what you like via your profile) and then serve up an appropriate ad. But they don’t at all. All their ads are served based on what you’re viewing not who you are. Once again you get it before everyone else.

By: Sean Ammirati

Sean Ammirati — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:45:36 +0000

Really interesting post! Two questions / thoughts for you:
1) Is it important to segment audience data & behavior data. Demographic and browsing behavior while available will probably always have limitations. However, if you track the right behavior – optimization can be appropriate. Obviously for lead generation, click or some other action works well. For brand / awareness building, I’m pretty sure it isn’t a click – but equally sure it isn’t an impression. I talk about this a little here – http://profitablesignals.com/blog/?p=169 .. Any reaction?

2) Since you sit on the agency side of the table … is part of the issue creating enough different types of creative that the message can be targeted to a specific audience? It seems like the message needs to be hyper-targeted as well the audience it is delivered to. Obviously that is part of the genius of text ads, you can pay copywriters to create hundreds or even thousands of ads for a single client instead of orders of magnitude less when talking about display ads.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 03:43:03 +0000

As a publisher, data has always been a tool for us to improve our visitor experience and to add and create values across our sites.

Whats really interesting is that we are seeing the requests for that data trickling down to our small business advertisers. In other words the late majority (mainstream) is now trying to peek into that “walled garden” of data. Which in turn is driving demand for more data on our part. Very exciting indeed.

By: Jonah

Jonah — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:50:38 +0000

The current state of the market would seem to present very lucrative opportunities for the right team who can execute. I’ve had an idea along these lines tickling the back of my brain for a few days. Offer bloggers and such a free hosted web analytics service like Google/Gum/Mint, with a javascript snippet that includes a pixel as well. Cookies + pixel = global web behavior. The value proposition for the bloggers is that lots of services give you anonymous behavior data for your own site, and show you the referral info, but why not see what your audience is doing beyond your site and the page that came before it? The blogger gets help tuning his site, you add another user access point to your network. From there you can go in multiple directions, but it’s a from a theoretically boot-strappable starting point.