Connected Advertising Blog

Showing the continuing the challenge of display advertising that I wrote about a few months ago, ComScore, along with Starcom, release another study last month. Back then, about 16% of the users made up 80% of the clicks; now less than 10% do. 84% don’t click at all.

I find this trend interesting in light of a newly released study,”Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It” from the University of Pennsylvania – Annenberg School for Communication, in which 66% of respondents did NOT want ads that were specifically targeted to their interests.

There is an obvious challenge here. Users don’t like our display ad messages, and are not comfortable with the technology that can help us make them better. All is not entirely lost, as a significant portion are influenced by ads, as they are followed up by searches or direct-to-site navigation. But, much of the technology that lets us see that, is the very technology that consumers would rather we not use.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the distinction between building a brand and leveraging it. In short, building is what you do up to the time the consumer is ready to buy, while leveraging it is what you do when you are pulling all the pieces together to close the sale. The point was / is, that building or leveraging the brand is not about the media, marketers, brand managers or agencies. It is about the consumer and where are they in the shopping process.

“While this conversation regularly comes up in search, the same discussion needs to happen around display. Geo-targeting, behavioral targeting and other user profiling capabilities allow us to learn about consumer intent. As they visit sites, they may indicate that it is no longer time to tell them about Honda’s great quality, but instead focus on the great gas mileage of the Civic, or even the service and quality of a specific dealer. We have to be more open to the intent in order to provide the consumer with the right information.”

I truly appreciate the road AOL and others are trying to travel. As I wrote before, search never has been a stand alone, and we are quickly approaching the time when folks will no longer be able to pretend otherwise. As AOL and others seek to enhance their properties through technological integrations such as Tacoda’s BT network, or Revenue Sciences remarketing abilities, they have an even bigger hurdle to meet: Getting their account service teams well versed in the different verticals, and more importantly, how they work together (I dislike even using the term ‘vertical’… gives credence to the idea that these are separate when they are not.)

While the media properties are spending a great deal of time creating these opportunities, and heavily promoting them in the press, they are simultaneously allowing their account services team to remain woefully ignorant. I can tell you, I hear the frustration in their voices when they have to admit that I know as much or more about these things as they do. So, here is my suggestion to the ‘powers that be’ in the AOL’s of the world: Stop treating account / client service teams as conduits and start treating them as consultants, giving them the corresponding education to back it up.

I can not tell how much money they have lost because they forced the CS teams into situations where they are simply meeting makers trying to connect our team with someone, somewhere who knows something about the 10% of their media that happens to be the subject of our interest. Compound that with the fact that, no matter how closely related another ‘product’ may be, should you bring it up, they have to say that you need to speak to someone else (and then they have a conversation between themselves as to who that person might be). I think this is a tremendous waste of talent.

I’m not here to help the media properties make more money. But, if they do, then that means my team found a great opportunity for our business. The bottom line is, as long as the media continue to silo these opportunities, we, the advertisers, lose money (or make less money, however you want to view it).