I get it, it makes total sense. To expand their market they need to find people who aren’t currently / frequently using their services… to capture competitive share they need to go where their competitive set hunts. But you have to agree that this is optically weird. At least heavy up on some display ads off of your core site, or mobile ads. Here’s the article, WSJ… http://on.wsj.com/HbF3t5… Google’s spending on traditional advertising grows four-fold to $213M.
Practice what you preach in your #advertising? Google puts money on offline ad investments:-)
March 27, 2012
1 Comment | 
Media, Online Display Ads, Strategy | Tagged: digital media, Google, media consumption, media investment, media mix optimization | 
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Posted by Mark Ogne
Enterprise – has the word lost its’ meaning?
March 12, 2012Yester-year I worked to connect large direct response retailers to their first ecommerce experience – integrating commerce and content systems into “enterprise resource planning” systems (ERP). While we hear less about ERP systems these days, the point of those solutions was that it really did connect all aspects of the business… finance, inventory, customer service, billing, and more.
Today, we use the word enterprise to describe something that we either want a VC to perk up and hear, or something that involves merging a few disparate things. I read a MediaPost article today, “Enterprise DMP Will Require Companies to Merge Data Silos“, and was reminded of this point.
While I thoroughly agree with the authors premise that data silos are on their way out, I disagree that having a larger silo is substantively better. Or, that it represents the “enterprise”. Combining more digital data for the purpose of sending more, or even better, digital messages is a great ideal but is not the right answer. Two points to consider…
- To rightfully use the term, enterprise, it should at least cover a majority of the average media spend, if not all of it. Combining all digital channels, the best we can see in this digital coverage is about a 25% of ad spend and 40% of the consumption of media.
- Consumers exhibit multichannel behavior, 70% research and purchase in different channels, online versus offline. Being better at just the online part of this equation match well with consumer expectations or marketer needs.
Leave a Comment » | Customer Experience, Media, Multi-channel marketing, Online Display Ads, Strategy | Tagged: digital marketing, digital media, marketing silo, multichannel, online marketing strategy | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne
#Digital #Attribution is a misnomer
March 9, 2012
The concept of “last click” is as flawed as attributing the purchase of an adult beverage to the neon sign hanging outside the liquor store. The concept of “Digital attribution” simply tries to count the number of beer signs the person saw. What about TV, bill boards, demographics and socioeconomic factors?
While reading a Digiday article this morning, “The Last-Click Attribution Dilemma“, two arguments presented by the author struck me as worthy of comment…
- Authors point – Brand marketers are staying out of display ads because of the inherent inability to properly attribute spend to results. Really?!? Is TV a good example of being able to attribute spend to results? Of course not. Yet, this has been the haven for brand dollars for generations. I suggest that while attribution is AN argument to this issue, the main argument is that display ad technologies target consumers very poorly and that those targeting capabilities have little to do with the knowledge and needs of brand marketers. Comscore identified that 80% of targeted ads fail to reach their intended audience. Pause for a second… yes, 80% failure. Why? They all rely upon poor proxies of the real, underlying predictive insight required… bad and incomplete data. 3rd party cookies, context and behavior are not sufficient. Individually or collectively.
- Authors point – focus on expanding perspective of digital touch points to do attribution properly. Three research points come to me: 1) about 40% of ad impressions occur in digital channels; 2) Forrester estimates that 70% of consumers exhibit multichannel behavior – researching in one channel and purchasing in another; 3) multichannel customers contribute 4-5 times the revenue per customer than single channel customers. Doing a perfect job at assembling all digital touch points will never be enough. I suggest it’s a false objective. It misses the perspective of consumer behavior, information necessary to support executive media mix decisions and simply creates focus on the minority of ad spend.
All of this makes me thirsty… Sierra Nevada’s my favorite beer!
1 Comment | Customer Experience, Differentiated Value of a Customer, Marketing Data, Media, Multi-channel marketing, Strategy, Website personalization / targeting | Tagged: analytics, attribution, media consumption | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne
Is #SocialMedia a consumer haven or a #marketing channel?
March 5, 2012
While reading an #AdAge article today, it dawned on me… we have yet to see how social will really play in the marketing mix. The article – “Facebook Warns Brands that Scale in Social Won’t Come For Free” – explains Facebook’s position that marketers are going to need to increase their expectations of cost when it comes to reaching the large audiences they’ve amassed. Here’s a provocative question, do consumers agree to the value exchange? Do they believe in giving up their personal information and being exposed to ad impressions? Sure, they agree to terms and conditions, but do they reciprocate that interest by clicking, buying and advocating the advertisements?
My prediction… the game has hardly started, we don’t yet know the players and it’s too early to calculate the final answer… but todays’ consumer will win.
My humble opinion… social media sites are perceived differently than other consumer tools and destinations. It’s a very personal experience that will prove to result in strained relationships as technologist and marketers attempt to monetize. Consumers add content, share it with others and increase their networks… for themselves. Intervention by external forces who attempt to shift the value equation for the consumer, from participation to monetization, will result in flight to the next “cool” thing. Search engines, blogs, portals and commerce sites have familiar business models and rather predictable consumer interaction and reception. I don’t purport to speak for all consumers but it seems to me that the familial, personal interaction with social sites serves a vastly different purpose on the part of the consumer.
I’m just say’n… but do mark this date on your calendar:-)
2 Comments | Social Media Marketing, Strategy, Thoughts | Tagged: consumer expectation, facebook, social media | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne
#QuoteOfTheDay – “There’s a difference between knowing your $hit and knowing you’re $hit!”
February 27, 2012Some people don’t get this… It’s OK to not know everything… it’s not OK to present that you know something when you really don’t. Find the things that you know, and then the things that you don’t know but would like to learn. Don’t dabble in what you don’t know and don’t need to know. Let it go… have some focus!
Like this:
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Posted by Mark Ogne
A scary, privacy embattled ad solution by any other name is still a scary, privacy embattled ad solution
January 23, 2012I love reading the DigiDay newsletter, a great publication, but some of the articles recently have just been odd. This morning’s article, Ad Industry Want to Rebrand Behavioral Advertising, is the second in a row. Here are a few quotes from the article that caught my eye…
- “It stands to reason that the advertising industry, faced with unease over behavioral advertising, would choose a rebranding exercise. It’s not behavioral advertising, you see, it’s ‘interest-based advertising.’ ”
- “The new effort, done by McCann’s MRM in Salt Lake City, takes on the thankless task of educating consumers about the AdChoices icon that’s popping up in many banner ads. One thing the “Your AdChoices” effort doesn’t do is call behavioral advertising, well, behavioral advertising.”
- “This makes sense. Interest-based advertising sounds much more benign and let’s face it creepy than behavioral.”
Rebranding of behavioral advertising is probably the right thing but the whole thought that this is the best approach is just missing the point. Cross domain tracking of consumer behavior, selling the insight to the highest bidder, is a scary proposition. The fact that it can be done doesn’t mean that it should, or that it is actually good. Leave aside the part that behavior is bottom of funnel activity, and the online channel is lamenting its’ inability to attract brand ad spend (anyone see incongruence?), the whole concept of behavioral targeting is tech based and seeks to extract value exchange from consumers in a rather insideous way.
The balance of ad tech has been, and will continue to be, technology driven and not focused on the actual engagement of consumers. The idea that behavior is a meaningful predictor of purchase intent is flawed… I once read a research piece on the predictors of buying a flat panel tv… one would think that the online behavior of looking at flat panels was a good predictor, it was number 26.
Instead of trying to convince congress and consumers that this is actually “interest-based advertising”, why don’t we start by asking what the actual predictors are to purchase intent and audience identification then back into that question an approach that provides value to consumers and not just ad tech intermediaries?
2 Comments | Online Display Ads, Thoughts | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne
Link to my New Years resolution byline on the Demand Metric Blog…
January 19, 2012http://blog.demandmetric.com/2012/01/17/new-years-resolutions-for-marketers-part-iii/
Here are the highlights… in three points…
1) Learn to identify and digest anonymous, semi-identifiable and identifiable data
2) Learn how to leverage customer lifetime value, or a strong proxy for customer value, in your media investment decisions
3) Learn how to better market at the customer level, this will be the trend to discuss next year!
Leave a Comment » | Differentiated Value of a Customer, Links & Stuff, Multi-channel marketing, Strategy, Thoughts | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne
Narrow solutions lead to false impressions
December 30, 2011
Subtitle: If all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail
I recently read an article in digiDay, written by the CEO of a modestly large online personalization firm. The title drew me in… “Outsourcing Data Management is a Mistake“. As I read, I was consistently impressed with the idea that narrow solutions, while interesting, lead to profound mistakes.
An open reply to the article -
If the proposal is that better management of online data needs to drive towards online personalization, I believe the premise and conclusions of the article are too narrow. While interesting, they are incomplete. Consider this, even if the premise is executed perfectly, advertisers will still have not solved 60% to 80% of the problem. A growing portion of media is being consumed online and a growing number of transactions are occuring online, but it’s still a minority.
The root of my point is that the writers premise solves only a small portion of all consumers interactions with a brand… not all portions of some consumers. In a world where more than 60% of consumers act in a multichannel manner and bring 4 to 5 times more value (Forrester research), solving the larger problem of multichannel insight has become the new table stakes. Using the writers premise, relying solely upon online actions to drive personalization, success would rely upon shere luck that a media impression would actually be triggered by the appropriate marketing reason.
Until we have a data management solution that leverages the knowledge, segmentation and targeting of a brand as the primary data select and targeting methodology, we’re going to be chasing after the big money with small solutions. Consumer behavior is more complex than the distillation of online data. Consumer expectations are greater. The problems marketers are trying to solve are larger.
What you propose isn’t wrong, I feel it’s just incomplete.
Love to hear your thoughts!
Leave a Comment » | Customer Experience, Differentiated Value of a Customer, Marketing Data, Multi-channel marketing, Strategy, Website personalization / targeting | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne
#QuoteOfTheDay – “never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity”
December 28, 2011Whether competitive intelligence or personal relationships, consider this quote. It’s easy to get wrapped up in trying to figure out why people do or say something… flip the equation and first figure out if they actually knew enough to have intentionality.
Attribution – http://twitter.com/marksimoneny
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Posted by Mark Ogne
Great infographic – Incredible things that happen every 60 seconds on the Internet
December 26, 2011If you’ve ever wondered why people say that consumers, not marketers, have control of todays brands… here you go. Compound this with a stat from Forrester Research from 2009 (larger today)… consumers generate more than 500B social messages each year regarding products and services… and you see a pretty good picture as to the scale of the impact of the empowered consumer.
Leave a Comment » | Case Study / examples, Infographics, Social Media Marketing | Permalink
Posted by Mark Ogne
