Darius over at YoungGoGetter.com has written up a piece about the online advertising market with some good information about common ways advertisers and publishers measure the value of their site. He also talks about some ideas that have been proposed for measurement such as Return on Influence as well as an idea to raise the CPM floor in order to discourage “crappy” advertisers from inundating the public with annoying ads. This combined with a shitstorm of negative comments from people on Digg and Reddit on Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick has proved to me that there is a high degree of misunderstanding about online advertising and how advertisers choose where and what to advertise.
First, some disclaimers, I’m speaking only from my personal experience with major brand-name clients. I’m not talking about your 2nd tier dating site or your sleazy mobile phone ringtone provider. What those guys do, I have no part in. But I can tell you this… whatever it is they’re doing, it’s working. At the end of the day, you have to remember that these companies are running a business and if the advertising isn’t generating a positive ROI, they would have pulled it a long time ago. There are articles about how LowerMyBills.com’s crazy ads generate a really high click-through rate and conversion rate - annoying ads often are effective and that’s why they’re everywhere you go online.
Confession #1 - Snake Oil is Out - Stuff you Want is In
It may be hard for you to believe this, but we really hate trying to sell things you don’t need to you. Seriously, why would any smart advertiser waste money on advertising something that you probably don’t want? The truth is, we try to be smart about targeting our advertising so that you get relevant products and messaging. We do this a lot of ways including looking at what types of sites you’ve visited as well as any type of demographic/geographic data we can figure out.
Confession #2 - We Value Privacy - Tracking is really NOT Evil
This is what gets me boiling. You go on Digg, read the comments, and you always have your 10-20 people who start screaming about “blah blah cookies, spying on me.. blah blah .. conspiracy”. Believe it or not, our clients and us have very strict privacy policies for data collection online. In our system, your computer is nothing more than a randomized number which eventually expires. We don’t identify people, we identify machines and we try to get to some type of profile which helps us figure out what type of ad you would want to see and respond to the most. Most of the data we’re most interested in is actually just whether or not you’ve visited the advertiser’s website. If people would stop freaking out about cookies, you’ll probably get a lot more relevant and useful ads as opposed to totally irrelevant random ads.
Confession #3 - We Want You to LOVE Us
Smart advertisers are not out to sell you but to win your love. We’re not up in some ivory tower thinking about how to bombard you with ads. We actually are thinking about tools, content, and ways to help you. The days of mass advertising are over, we’re trying to engage in dialog now with every consumer. We’re looking at feedback and we’re finding ways to make engaging with our brand worthwhile and valuable to you.
Hopefully, you’ll find that online marketing people are not out to destroy the web as you know it. Advertising plays a very important role online — it’s called generating the revenue that pays the salary for your favorite online writer and it also pays for the servers and the bandwidth. There are definitely a lot of very very bad advertising out there, especially on sites that have low barriers to entry. I suggest that you stop clicking on them if you want them to go away. The business of advertising dictates that if it doesn’t work, drop it. Also, stop freaking out about legitimate 3rd party cookies and tracking because it’s anonymous and is only done to make sure you get ads that make sense. I’m sure everyone can agree on that.
