Fred and Brian –
All good points, and I think many of the individuals on here would be ecstatic (and simultaneously mortified) if display can ultimately outperform search. It would dramatically change the lead generation industry and finally threaten the large search giants.
My experience with the networks is similar to Brian’s in that they are technology companies first, second, third, fourth, and maybe marketers and media optimizers somewhere much further down the the list. This has created a unique opportunity for companies like MediaMath, Invite Media, mediageeks, and others, than are fighting to show the value of publisher’s audiences, and make it easy to agencies and networks to find individuals across mutliple sites, rather than buying on a mediakit basis.
Today, it still seems as though the art and audience segmentation is largely done offline by the agencies and advertisers, and then the target audience is sought through a mangled insertion order and translation process that essentially flattens the ideal lift curve down to a straight line. There isn’t an easy way for an agency or advertiser to easily find their target audience online, period. By pushing this square peg through a round hole, the networks are forced to “interpret” the desires of the agency, and in more cases than not, just do what they want, and report something after the 30M impressions are fulfilled.
Behavioral targeting, although it may employ the greatest technology and clickstream translation layer, resulting in some behavioral segment, isn’t understood by media buyers. We sit on the sidelines and remark how neat it is, but the sales teams and advertisers can’t find a relevant audience that way.
Depressed CPM’s is only excaberate the problem as more media will be purchased and more RON impressions will be used to backfill large orders.
In full disclosure, I have been working for over a year to combat this problem and provide a solution to power ad networks to drive informed ad serving and reach the true audience requested, but time and time again, networks want to tout their own capabilities and fall back on science and optimization, which in many cases, in neither science, nor optimization.
“The Ad Server just figures it all out in real-time” won’t work in 2009 and 2010.
-Dave
Originally posted as a comment by davidhelmreich on A VC using Disqus.
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