There is an abundant amount of digital inventory available to brand advertisers looking to purchase ad space, but what is the best way to spend ad dollars? On one hand, there is premium ad space that is well known to everyone. Think ESPN.com or NYTimes.com. You know what you’re buying, you can integrate your content, and you know the audience you are reaching. This is how advertising has been bought and sold since it was invented. But there are fewer and fewer spaces with known audiences at scale because the media landscape keeps fracturing down to smaller and smaller niche sites [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column

If there's one thing that's characterized the digital marketing universe, it's fragmentation. Marketers use one tool/platform to implement one campaign element, another tool to implement a second, and never the twain shall meet -- not in trafficking, and certainly not in reporting. And, of course, there are usually many more than two elements. This Achilles' heel is starting to pain marketers more than ever now, as their target audiences are engaging with messages on a multitude of devices and expecting consistency. "It’s hard to reach the right audience at the right moment with the ri [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Google: Display Advertising | Google: Search | Top News

In politics, the act of drawing, reviewing and re-structuring district lines for voting purposes to ensure that like demographics are aligned is a common practice. These lines appear bizarre when viewed on a map due to the non-uniform nature of redistricting. Why don’t politicians just use ZIP codes?  Politicians learned many years ago that zip codes are not demographically sensitive. While it is fair to assume that there are some similarities with you and your immediate neighbors, within a few short blocks there are often stark contradictions across virtually every demographic data p [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column

It couldn't have happened at a worse time for Facebook, which has its initial public offering of stock later this week. General Motors has decided to stop advertising on the social networking giant, citing concerns about the site's effectiveness. Meanwhile, a Forrester analyst says other companies are having doubts The GM news comes from a Wall Street Journal report that relies on "people familiar with the matter." It's been confirmed by GM itself in other stories, such as at The Guardian. According to the story, the automotive company will still maintain pages on Facebook -- on whi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Business Issues | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Top News

Social media ad spending is expected to double in the U.S. between now and 2016, according to a new forecast from BIA/Kelsey. The data are from BIA/Kelsey's U.S. Local Media Forecast, which sees a compound annual growth rate of 21 percent in social media advertising. The forecast estimates social media ad spend at $4.8 billion in 2012 and doubling to $9.8 billion by 2016. (That's slightly more than double, to be precise.) BIA/Kelsey estimates that about one-third of that ad spend will be from local advertisers, with their ad spending in the U.S to grow from $1.2 billion this year to $3.1 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Statistics: Online Advertising | Statistics: Spend Projections

Recently, the topic of attribution has been taking some heat, as agencies and clients try to determine the best way to assign value to various advertising channels. While some are more willing to accept different models than others, all marketers must embrace this movement immediately. I’m going to focus here only on digital media -- which, as we will see, is hard enough. Figuring out an attribution model that works across all media is the real nirvana. Given that an advertiser knows if you see their ad, click on it, visit their site, and buy their product, you’d think that measuring [...]

Related Topics: Analytics | Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column | Search Marketing

Historically, interactive display advertising has served the singular purpose of supporting direct-response initiatives. This is largely because direct response means there’s a very tangible action to track and measure -- making a purchase, filling out a lead-gen form, becoming a member, etc. Brand advertising, however, involves ambiguous milestones that can be difficult to track and quantify, making traditional display metrics -- which are contingent on a two-step action-to-conversion process -- inadequate for understanding the impact of brand-focused ads. Because of the lack of measu [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column | Retargeting & Remarketing

For many years many publishers and researchers have been fighting a battle against the "tyranny of the click." They've been trying to argue that clicks are a poor metric to rely upon in assessing digital ad campaign performance. Digital measurement firm comScore has been a vocal advocate of developing an alternative set of metrics -- especially when it comes to display and rich media advertising. Another study supporting that argument, from comScore and Pretarget, argues that "ad viewability and hover time are more strongly correlated with conversions (defined as purchases and requests for [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Google: Business Issues | Google: Display Advertising | Statistics: Online Advertising

Online advertising spend topped $30 billion (coming in at $31.7 billion) for the first time in 2011, with a 22% growth rate over 2010, marking a return to pre-recession rates of growth. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) today released revenue numbers for the full year of 2011, which also included the best-ever $9 billion quarter in Q4. For the first time, spending on Internet advertising has surpassed that on cable television, with both national and local revenues accounted for. And cable television is one of the only categories showing positive grow [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Display Advertising | Search Marketing | Statistics: Email Marketing | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Online Advertising | Top News | Video

[caption id="attachment_10198" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Sanaz Ahari, the Senior Product Manager for Brand Activate"][/caption] Citing the conventional wisdom that a lack of branding impact metrics is hindering ad dollars from moving online, Google today unveiled an initiative it's calling "Brand Activate," which involves the adoption of branding-oriented metrics and the roll-out of tools to measure them across its product portfolio. The initiative gives a strong push to industry-wide standards proposed by the Making Measurement Make Sense coalition, which includes the Inte [...]

Related Topics: Branding | Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Google: Display Advertising | Statistics: General | Top News

Word-of-mouth recommendations and reviews, either from someone they know or a stranger's opinions online, are the most trusted sources of information for buying decisions, according to the latest Nielsen's latest Global Trust in Advertising report, The findings speak highly for information gathered through social media or other forms of user-generated content. Meanwhile, though traditional paid media still are trusted by a great number of consumers, their influence is on the decline. Nearly half of consumers around the world say the trust ads on TV (47%), in magazines (47%) and in newspaper [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Email Marketing | Facebook: Advertising | Mobile Marketing | Search Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Statistics: General

Google has a free tool that I consider to be a Swiss army knife of free keyword tools.  Few people even know this free tool exists. Many of those who know about it have never really played with all of its features. Maybe it's the name of the tool: Contextual Targeting Tool. I have to admit, the name fits what the tool was originally built for, but it really doesn't give you any clues as to how powerful this tool really is. A little over a year ago, Google officially announced The Contextual Targeting Tool. It was originally designed to build campaigns and AdGroups for the Google Display Ne [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column | Google: Display Advertising

Your business website is beautiful, full of interesting content, images, and cool functionality. You’re feeling good -- until you try to view it on your smartphone or tablet. If your website has not been optimized for an audience on-the-go with a smaller screen, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to drive physical traffic to your business. But effectively maximizing your mobile visibility includes far more than just the aesthetics of your website. Now that we have your attention, it’s time to tackle the essentials of optimizing your business website for mobile consumption. Ca [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Mobile Marketing Column | Search Marketing

The challenge of appropriately attributing online advertising's influence on a user exposed to multiple channels continues to slow the movement of additional ad spend by brands. That was one of the topics highlighted at the OMMA Global conference in San Francisco recently. While the historic battle cries of view-through impressions, click-based optimization and last-touch attribution are finally being dismissed and downplayed (as they should be), the push for viewable impressions to become the leading metric played a prominent role in the agenda. The challenges of online performance meas [...]

Related Topics: Analytics & Marketing Column | Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising

Not only are an average of 31% of display ads never even seen, but there's little to no correlation between the CPMs sites are charging and the value they're delivering to the advertisers -- where value is defined as ads being viewed and delivered to the primary demographic target. That's the conclusion of the full study comScore released today, which looked at 1.8 billion impressions in 18 campaigns run by advertisers including Allstate, Chrysler, Discover, E-Trade, Ford, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kimberly Clark, Kraft, and Sprint. The vCE Charter Study was conducted by comScore in Decem [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Statistics: Online Advertising

The partnership that has Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo cross-selling display ads on the other sites is now open for business and up and running, according to a blog post from Microsoft. The relationship, which first came to light in September of last year, is partly a reaction to Google's increasing dominance in the display ad universe. Google overtook Yahoo in display market share for the first time last year, according to IDC. Facebook, too, has become -- and is growing even greater -- a major threat in the display category. Microsoft says its Microsoft Media Network (powered by the Microso [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Google: Display Advertising | Microsoft | Top News | Yahoo

The ads are classics: Coca-Cola's Vietnam-era "Hilltop" ad, where a chorus sang of wanting to buy the world a Coke; Volvo's introduction to the U.S. with an ad that invited people to "Drive It Like You Hate It,"; Alka Seltzer's "I can't believe I ate the whole thing"; and Avis's "We Try Harder" spot -- a TV ad that later became the company's slogan. Even now, decades after they aired, folks in the ad biz remember these iconic campaigns and long to achieve anything approaching their impact on the culture. Anyone in today's interactive advertising business has surely wondered whether [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Video | Display Advertising | Features & Analysis | Google: Display Advertising | Google: Google+ | Google: Mobile | Google: YouTube

Ads that follow you around the web? Marketers have been putting them to good use. But a new survey finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that nearly three-quarters of those asked dislike such targeting. And people do notice -- nearly two-thirds report experiencing being targeted by ads. The findings are from a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Around 2,000 adults in the US were surveyed between January 20 and February 19 of this year and asked a variety of questions about targeted ads. Targeted Ads? Not OK People were asked how they felt about targeted ads: Rather t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Features & Analysis | Google: Display Advertising | Internet Marketing Industry: Stats | Legal: Privacy | Retargeting & Remarketing | Statistics: Online Behavior | Top News

Spending on display media is projected to grow at a rapid pace over the next few years ($11.73 billion by 2015, according to eMarketer forecasts) -- a testament to the efficacy of banner ads as a meaningful tactic for influencing internet audiences. As advertisers begin considering allocating more and more budget to display media, it’s important they keep in mind a few tips to make sure they’re getting the most out of the banner ad campaigns. Tip #1: Interactivity Modern banner-ad technology is extremely versatile. Banner ads can be designed to do anything a website can do -- product sc [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column

I recently went onto Quora to notice someone had asked the question that is the bane of my existence: “What are the barriers to widespread adoption of dynamic display ad platforms and formats?” Folks provided great answers and I’ve hinted to a few solutions in my previous columns, but it’s important to really attack those barriers given the results we’ve seen like: Data-driven dynamic creative can increase return on advertising spend (ROAS) anywhere between 2 to 20 times Almost all indications of user sentiment to personalized/relevant ads is very positive (minus a few incident [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Display Advertising Column | Yahoo