Triggit

Today the IAB, DMA, AAAA, ANA, and BBB (gotta love the alphabet soup) released a collection of principles for behavioral targeting. With congress discussing potentially passing legislation to regulate online targeting, our industry is trying to get out in front of the issue and prevent the calamity of ignorant laws. Ignore for a second that offline databases- which has been around for 50+ years- have deep repositories of data about consumers that are tied to names and addresses and no one is talking about regulating them. The regulation that is being discussed is to make behavioral targeting opt-in. As we all know, getting opt-in for anything is virtually impossible at any level about 1%. So if congresses passes opt-in, it will effectively make behavioral targeting illegal.

What this means for the internet is a lot more significant then most people understand. Without the ability to use data about customers to enhance targeting, marketers will not be able to pay as much for ads as we currently do. With good targeting, less ads are wasted and a marketer can afford to pay more for each impression. Without BT the opposite is true and less efficient targeting means less efficient advertising and lower CPMs. If that happens, online publishers and the internet as a whole that depends on ad revenue is in for quite a nasty shock.

John Nadrone from X+1 has a great post on the next generation of media buying up on iMedia: Getting Online Advertising Right. It is worth a read. I think his conclusions are spot on.

The OPA and Comscore released a report today where they explore the behavior of users after being exposed to display advertising. You can see the deck here. They come to some very interesting conclusions. One of the things that I found most surprising was that supposedly a user exposed to an ad will then visit the advertiser’s website 30% of the time and execute a search for the brand 20% of the time. Those are huge numbers. If that is true, a $5 cpm backs into 1.6 cents a visit. That is unbelievable. At those prices every website in the world should be buying display advertising. Since remnant CPMs are currently less then a $1, display advertising is the deal of the century if you can buy users for a third of a penny. I am going to be very interested to watch the response to this report.

Cory Treffiletti- the president at Catalyst:SF, has a piece on Mediapost today where he discusses the shift to data driven media buying. It is worth a read. One of the parts that I found interesting was how daunting the new advances in media buying are to players in the space. We have been seeing a lot of the same thing here at Triggit. Educating our customers and the market about what data driven media buying is has been a large part of our efforts. Thankfully, once we can show results the conversation becomes a ton easier. It goes from “What is all this crazy RTB, third party data, multivariate valuation, exchange bidding…stuff” to “How can I get more of that?”. It is amazing how well results speak for themselves and work through confusion. There is still a lot of work to do in educating the market, but it great how the advantages of the new processes and technology make it a ton easier.

It looks like Google is finally going to release the next version of their exchange. Business week has a short article on it today. Google is hosting a pair of events on each coast at the end of the month for an announcement, most likely it will be version two. We are looking forward to it.

Interpublic today announced their new digital media trading company called Cadreon. Welcome to the space guys.

The New York Times had an article on Sunday about trading on the digital ad exchanges. It was pretty exciting to see our new direction on the cover of the NYT Sunday business section. The article profiles our friends over at Varick Media Management and does a pretty good job discussing the industry. It missed a lot of important stuff, but what can you expect from a general business reporter? It is worth the read.

Darren Herman from Varik has a great post on his blog about media optimization. In the post he discusses the future of online media optimization and targeting and points out that it will become highly automated process. Since we here at Triggit highly agree with him, we think its worth a read.

Joe at adexchanger.com has a great post today with a Q&A of Bill Morrison and Robert Coolbrith who are equity analysts at ThinkEquity Partners. They have an awesome report called “The Opportunity In Non-Premium Display Advertising.” that you should read if you are at all interested in the space. If you’d like a copy ” email Bill at: - wmorrison at thinkequity dot com”.

One of the things that I enjoyed seeing in the post is that BIll and Robert agree that enabling the buyside to more transparnetly, efficiently and effectively buy inventory will increase CPMs for good publishers. Contrary to common misconception, transparent exchanges will decommodify inventory and actually make publishers more at substantially less cost.

Jim Larrison from Adify has an interesting post on Adotas today where he weighs in on the discussion about buying media based on algorithms vs hand picking a set of contextually relevant sites. Needless to say, here at Triggit we are a bit biased towards the former. Jim takes the side of hand picking sites, and argues that agencies can bring all their unique insights into the equation to do a really good job of it. But, haven’t we been doing that for the last 10+ years with increasingly dismal results? The question I have for Jim is how the position he advocates is actually going to take us to a better place? At least with algorithms, real time multivariate analysis and transparent impression level bidding, we have been able to show significant lift in all levels of performance. We have been seeing nothing but decreasing returns from the guys who are hand picking their media.

I have been seeing this debate popping up more and more this year. It seems that as the recession squeezes media budgets, the trade off of poorly performing ads in exchange for so called “safety” is finally open for discussion. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.