NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Why media buyer distrust publishers
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> Why media buyer distrust publishers
Joel Gehman (jgehman_at_creativelabs.com)
Mon, 24 Aug 1998 05:23:33 -0500 (CDT)
Richard:
You make some very good points. While we've seen some hiccups,
they are more often technology-related, not breakdowns in
interpersonal communications. That said, we have found that it
is necessary to monitor and audit (on an almost daily basis) any
external campaigns. Specifically, we have had instances of gross
under-delivery of impressions, mis-targeting and massive
click-thru discrepencies.
In all cases, when confronted, our vendors were very willing to
amend the situation. I believe these problems are not
symptomatic of negligence on the part of advertising vendors per
se, but merely a reflection of the inadequacy of the tools we all
rely on to conduct advertising on the Web.
Ad serving, site analysis and other major technologies simply
haven't been able to keep up. The majority of these tools seem
to be made by engineers who love their technology--not designed
by business people with the goal of solving business problems.
We have been struggling to find tool vendors that can do more
that count, but rather produce intelligence.
Let me illustrate. Suppose my log file shows that traffic from
the US is 20x, .CA is 4x and .BR and .MX are each 2x. What does
that mean? Should .BR be 1x or 4x? The tool can't tell me. In
order to get intelligence, I need to add 3rd party data. Perhaps
I go over to NetWizards (www.nw.com) and grab host data for the
relevant countries, then I go get census data. Now I can
calculate hosts/capita and index all countries as to their level
of connectivity. I can take the same census data and calculate
visits/capita. Now I can plot hosts/capita versus visits/capita.
One would expect a linear result, where connectivity should
predict visits. Now lets say .BR has very low hosts/capita (which
it does) but even lower visits. What does this mean? Perhaps it
means I need to add Portugese-language content to my site,
because .BR is under-performing relative to its connectivity.
Why can't my site analysis tool have the hooks to grab all this
data and spit it out everyday for me???
Let's say my users register on my site and I know what
ST/Province they are from, why can't my site analysis tool do per
capita penetration. Why can't I plug in my CPMs, and have my
tool fetch my ad reports, reconcile vendor reported clicks vs.
my log file clicks and point out discrepencies? How about the
lifetime value of a c|net click versus Yahoo versus Tripod?
In short, the industry needs standards. What is an ad click?
How should various tools talk to each other? How does the
database of NetGravity integrate with Net.Genesis and
registration data and transaction data, etc. Each tool is
developed in a vaccuum. Tool vendors that can solve the
integration, standardization and "intelligence not counting"
problem will emerge with massive marketshare and likely massive
marketcaps to boot.
Joel Gehman
Internet Marketing Analyst
Creative Labs, Inc.
mailto:jgehman_at_creativelabs.com
http://www.soundblaster.com
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