NONE: ONLINE-ADS>> Why media buyer distrust publishers
ONLINE-ADS>> Why media buyer distrust publishers
richard_at_tenagra.com
Wed, 19 Aug 1998 19:20:15 -0500 (CDT)
Andy Bourland wrote:
>I came away from this week's Jupiter Online Advertising Conference
>with a disquieting feeling. I sensed a fundamental lack of respect
>and trust between, on one side, the advertisers and agencies
>and on the other, web site publishers and the companies who
>provide services for them.
I'll tell you why this is, as I again today bared witness to another screw
up caused by a publisher that made Tenagra look stupid to a client.
One of my marketing people negotiated an online media buy with a major
national newspaper. I don't want to say who it is, other than it is a
two-word name, one of which is "Today" and the other is the initials of
the United States of America.
A week ago a rep at this newspaper implied she could give us space on all
the weather pages for different cities this paper serves for a certain
price. We, of course, go to the client and say it looks like the deal is in
the bag. We get a call today from a DIFFERENT rep who says we can't do it.
The sticking point is so stupid. Basically the paper sells each of these
city's weather pages at a fixed rate and they aren't willing to let any of
them go for less than that fixed rate, even the ones generating pitiful
impressions per month. We proposed buying everything for a pretty fair
price. (The CPM for the whole buy averaged about $20.)
There are two things that piss me off about this whole thing:
1.) the rep led us to believe that our original deal (one price for
everything) was quite doable.
2.) they won't even throw in the low performing pages to make us happy. It
is as if they expect that someone is going to buy some podunk page getting
20 impressions per month for a fixed price.
This isn't the first time I've felt the need to distrust what a publisher
is telling me. About two months ago we did an ad buy on a major network. It
was a nightmare from day one. They could not get the ads to run to our
specifications to save their lives. In fact, I went so far as to institute
a policy of redirecting the click-throughs through our server just monitor
that the flight is, in fact, up and running. If the ads are running on
high-traffic pages, it impossible to tell if they even put the damn things
up without a real-time report.
After talking with others in the industry, screw ups like this seem to be
commonplace. One of my friends who runs an interactive agency makes lots of
keyword buys on two major search engines. During a campaign he has to have
an account exec periodically check that in fact the client's banners are
still attached to the keywords they bought. This is because these search
engines commonly drop their banners in mid-flight. These are major,
publicly-traded companies with outragous valuations. You would think that
such companies would have the money to do better quality control.
I understand perfectly why there is such distrust between media buyers and
publishers. Publishers far too often make us look like screw-ups.
Anyone care to comment?
richard
--------------------------------------------------------
richard hoy
moderator, online advertising discussion list
vice president, marketing and client promotions
the tenagra corporation
http://www.tenagra.com/
p: 281.480.6300 | f: 281.480.7715 | e: rhoy_at_tenagra.com
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