Thanks for posting this, Darren. A great and well argued overview of how the industry is changing.

Thanks for posting this, Darren. A great and well argued overview of how the industry is changing.

Good stuff man.

There are a few points worth expanding on, but I wanted to focus on the false sense of effectiveness that 'targeting data' affords.

Quite simply, if I went to network X and paid $15 CPMs for 5 targeted segments, but targeted them all with the same creative (non-unique message) there is really no reason why I shouldn't have just paid $3 CPMs for Run of Network as it would have included the “targeted segments”, which is much more cost effective and there is still usually a layer of optimization that occurs at the RON level. This is usually the case when it comes to digital media plans and is where the false sense of effectiveness creeps in for the following reasons:

1. Showing the segments in a client presentation makes you look smarter
2. Everyone is addicted the notion of targeting
3. As a planner you need to prove performance and the CTR might be 0.7% in the targeted segments because the number of impressions served was lower, and .09% for the RON campaign even if the same people clicked on the ads. With RON you just get a ton of extra impressions that could be driving awareness, recall, etc.
4. The CTR metric can be a tricky beast, as can all data, and can lead to many inaccurate conclusions

Thus, I believe that the next generation of data based targeting must reside within a larger framework, where it is only a component of the solution, not the end game.

A + B || C

( || means piped into… Geek reference back to Unix/Linux)

Put another way,

Targeting + Dynamic Creative || Dynamic Web Experience

Note: I prefer the term Targeting as data is useless without an effective algorithm making sense of it

This framework accounts for the full user experience with the brand and allows each component to self optimize, while simultaneously optimizing at an aggregate level . For example you can feed various targeting segments across your purchased inventory, feed hundreds of different iterations of creative to each segment through a dynamic unit, and optimize based on the clicks, engagement, etc.

At this point you are creating a number of optimized pairs say A3 (for Targeting algorithm #3) and B4 (Creative iteration #4).

These optimized pairs when piped into the dynamic web experience create customized sites for specific types of people that clicked on a particular ad.

For example, if I'm an “In-Market TV Buyer”, you can deliver a number of banners that depict different TV models, features, calls to action, etc. so that when activate a given banner the landing page highlights the information displayed on the banner I clicked.

It all sounds costly and time consuming, but many companies out there today provide these types of solutions for reasonable rates, and many times it takes less time than actually building traditional creative, as you only need to use a template and define the variables. For example, Adisn runs a dynamic solution for Buy.com that pipes in 150,000+ images and info from Buy.com's database. All it took was a template and an XML feed.

This is still a work in progress as no one has figured it all out quite yet; however, I do advocate that we all take a step back and look at this problem from a higher level.

Cheers all,

Seni

Good stuff Darren. Exciting things ahead!

Good stuff Darren. Thanks for posting – the coming years are going to be very interesting. Looking forward to seeing your follow-ups.

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Good post overall. Enjoyed reading it.

Well you can`t stop progress I guess.