DataView: The DataXu Blog

Category: data

The Great CTR Debate: DataXu’s Perspective
08/26/2010 | Categories: data, online advertising, trends
Darren Herman of MediaKitchen posted a slideshare earlier this week about the death of Click Through Rates (CTR). He gathered a number of his industry friends, including DataXu CEO Mike Baker and asked them – “Is the click through rate dead?”

Mike’s reponse: “We have clear and compelling evidence that optimizing on CTR is a sure way to waste your money. We help a leading packaged goods provider optimize on engagement and sales and we found that optimizing on CTR wastes 92% of their ad budget.”

See that ‘clear and compelling evidence’ in the below chart which shows the click and conversion results for a DataXu packaged goods client.
Search and Display: Has Convergence Arrived?
08/23/2010 | Categories: advertising, data, data driven decisioning, demand side platform, display advertising, DSP, online advertising, search advertising, trends

By Mike Baker, President & CEO, Dataxu

For years, many have viewed paid search advertising as the most simple and measurable form of online advertising. But with the growth of display ad exchanges and demand side platforms to manage the buying, display advertising has “gotten back in the efficiency game,” relying more squarely on data and bottom funnel metrics, and less on clicks and views.

Building on the data-driven approach championed by search engine marketers, demand side platforms are now enabling display advertisers to replace much of the guess work of traditional media plans with bidding algorithms built on the learnings from a campaign as it runs. Borrowing even more literally from search, advertisers are now starting to use consumer search data to retarget display advertising.

So, are search engine marketing and exchange traded display advertising ready for their convergence moment? Will search agencies successfully cross over into data-driven display practices? I recently spoke with Dax Hamman, VP display media at iCrossing, a Hearst-owned global digital marketing agency, to discuss these and other questions.

Mike Baker: Search advertising, by its nature, is highly measurable. In your role as a display advertising evangelist in an agency with its roots in SEM, how do you educate clients about the value of display campaigns and their unique metrics?

Dax Hamman: iCrossing has pioneered an approach to display that is particularly effective in ROI situations, focusing on talking to the individual expressing intent rather than simply shouting at the crowd. This approach is much more familiar to a search marketer and therefore is understood more by our client base than premium CPM buying and home page takeovers.

Often, the hardest leap a search marketer must take is how to measure the campaign. SEM is very click based and an action is easily tied to a result. Display conversely relies more on post-impression data, a continuing hot topic amongst marketers in general. At iCrossing, we advise clients to run quantifiable studies to benchmark the post-impression results and determine what should be accounted for. This is often enough to alleviate any concerns.

MB: Expertise in search engine marketing and display advertising has traditionally resided in separate domains – for both agencies and their clients. What will it take to successfully bridge that divide?

DH: Agencies often structure themselves to suit the needs of a client, and while clients continue to typically manage SEM and display out of separate budgets with distinct goals, agencies will provide two teams of specialists. At iCrossing, we have merged SEM and display into one single media practice and have been cross-training individuals in order to find the synergies that may exist. This “new” world of exchange buying makes display planners think more quantifiably and bid-based like a search marketer and so the two camps are more aligned. Sometimes questions arise such as “who should manage a performance campaign that uses real time bidding” as you need both types of expertise working together. Quite simply, we can provide the framework for both parties to learn the other’s trade, and then the more experience each person gains, the quicker the synergies will come.

MB: What can search advertisers learn from display advertising, and vice versa?

DH: Like any form of marketing, display and search do not sit in silos, therefore the learnings from one channel should inform the other. There are some specific cases though where the learnings are more direct. iCrossing has been testing search retargeting, with Yahoo for instance. We also have been buying the data directly, of which there are now several including Magnetic, Chango and Simpli.fi. The success of these campaigns is in part based on selecting the right keywords, of which the SEM campaign is the richest source of learning.

We also see cases where a SEM campaign can be improved by understanding why certain contextual buys in display are effective and what messaging works best. For instance, the iCrossing display team will often provide the creative units for a banner campaign on the Google Content Network for the SEM team to run.

MB: Cross-channel, multi-format convergence is the “holy grail” of digital advertising. How close are we? What role will the big three (Google, Yahoo, MSN) search engines play in making this vision a reality? This may be controversial, but do you view them as partners, competitors, or both?

DH: As an industry, we move closer and closer to convergence every day, and the benefits are being felt by brands already. The big 3 are certainly a factor in this, but we see them as more partner than competitor, educating search marketers about techniques such as display retargeting, and making it easy to buy it and place it. With the typical size and complexity of our clients, we do not see any of the engines being a sole provider to any of them. For smaller brands and smaller agencies I think the threat is greater – the reality is there are very few needs that a marketer at a small company cannot fulfill with Google.

DSPs like DataXu will be at the center of the convergence as more and more media comes together. I do not see just display or even display and search together being bought through such a platform, but potentially all media, including offline.

(This article also ran on ClickZ on 8/23: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1728864/search-display-has-convergence-arrived)
DataXu Helps iCrossing Extend Search Services into Display Traded Media
08/17/2010 | Categories: advertising, advertising optimization, data, demand side platform, digital media, display advertising, DSP, media buying, search advertising
Today we announced our partnership with Global Digital Marketing Agency iCrossing.

DataXu was selected as iCrossing’s Demand Side Platform, helping extend iCrossing’s growing display services into the exchange-traded display media market.

Already leaders in the search marketing space, this partnership will further develop iCrossing’s display offering, guiding clients’ media buying strategy with sophisticated decisioning and audience buying technology. Mirroring iCrossing’s search-advertising efficiencies, DataXu’s machine-learning technology creates advertiser-specific algorithms as well as simple pricing and targeting controls to guide display campaigns and improve ad performance.

“The convergence of search and display is all about data. We’re pleased to be working with an industry leader to define the next generation of data driven marketing,” said Mike Baker, President & CEO, DataXu.

Both DataXu and iCrossing will be speaking at SES San San Francisco this week. Per our most recent post, DataXu’s CEO Mike Baker will be participating in a SES panel on the topic of “Crossing the Digital Divide: The Leap from Search to Display.”

Today’s full press release is available at: http://www.dataxu.com/news/DataXuDSPforiCrossing.php
DataXu’s VP Sales to Speak on ‘Evolution of Display’ at FRWD Event in Minneapolis
08/04/2010 | Categories: advertising, data, data driven decisioning, digital advertising, display advertising, events, trends
DataXu’s VP of Sales and Go- to-Market strategy Steven Golus will speak at the FRWD event: “Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media”, on August 11 in Minneapolis. The event will consist of an afternoon of discussions with industry leading Publishers, Demand Side Platforms, Data Aggregators, Verification and Survey tools providers.

Steven will speak on the first panel of the day at 1:30 p.m. CT on the topic of “Leveraging Data in Display Targeting.” Joined by Brad King from BlueKai and Frost Prioleau of Simpli.fi, Steven will be discussing the integration of 3rd party and 1st party data into online display campaigns.

Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media
When: Wednesday Aug. 11, 2010

Time: Registration- 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM CT
Program- 1:00 PM- 5:00 PM CT
Happy Hour- 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM CT

Where: Fine Line Music Cafe: http://www.finelinemusic.com/directions.html

Cost: FREE

To learn more and register for this free event, see: http://www.frwdco.com/events/
DataXu MarketPulse: “Last Click Attribution: A Simple Way to Misallocate Your Budget”
07/28/2010 | Categories: data, digital advertising, MarketPulse, media buying, online advertising, trends
Today, we released our third MarketPulse newsletter, a regular publication utilizing DataXu’s proprietary data to uncover and reveal interesting trends in digital advertising. This month’s issue focuses on a highly contentious issue in the online advertising space – Last Click Attribution.

The full pdf is available here: DataXu MarketPulse_Last Click Attribution_July 2010 and below is snapshot of the report.

DataXu MarketPulse: July 2010

“Last Click Attribution: A Simple Way to Misallocate Your Budget”

Taking a look at data for six client campaigns, the DataXu team identified some interesting attribution trends.

Data highlights
- For all campaigns, last click attribution ignored 97% of spend driving conversions — which often results in over-spending in search and re-targeting, and under-spending in display that drives demand creation.
- The recommended attribution period for short consideration products, such as CPG, is two weeks. In the campaign shown above, this window includes 90% of impressions that converted.
- The recommended attribution period for long consideration products, such as Insurance and Autos is five weeks.
- The length of time it takes to attribute 90% of conversions varies by 250%; each product requires its own distinct attribution model
Ultimately, no two campaigns are alike, and what drives their success is tough to predict at the outset, but incredibly valuable to understand.
For the full MarketPulse report, you can download the pdf here: DataXu MarketPulse_Last Click Attribution_July 2010

DataXu’s MarketPulse explores the data that defines today’s digital advertising marketplace. Sign up here to have future MarketPulse newsletters delivered directly to your inbox.
Industry Leaders Collaborate to Make Digital Advertising More Efficient
07/16/2010 | Categories: advertising, data, digital advertising, digital media, innovation, media, media buying, online advertising, trends
Digital is the fastest growing and arguably most strategic sector of the advertising market, yet an agency executive recently told me that transaction costs are 300 percent greater than for television.

As is often the case with rapidly innovating industries, marketers are struggling to master and manage the media planning and buying workflow. With the recent launch of a coalition dedicated to developing industry standards, it seems that we may finally be able to make the business of digital advertising more efficient.

The complicated display advertising ecosystem (see diagram here) exacerbates work flow issues for agencies and their clients. Campaign data gets pushed through third party intermediaries, ad networks and exchanges, demand side platforms and more. Reporting, tracking and reconciliation tends to be manual and thus very inefficient.

Last week, Interpublic and Microsoft announced “MOMS” (Media Operations Management System), a program to overhaul the workflow involved in planning and buying digital media. The hope is that The American Association of Advertising Agencies will expand the initiative to a coalition of agencies, marketers, media and technology solution providers; developing standards for streamlining digital advertising with automated technology processes.

Beyond removing needless cost, initiatives like this inevitably streamline the ecosystem, hopefully weeding out the low value middle men that populate the landscape today, and shining a light on what specific points of value each vendor is providing. No doubt that these reform initiatives will become increasingly important to the industry’s survival much less growth over the next 5 years, with additional holding companies announcing similar efforts and embracing technology standards that will allow them to better leverage economies of scale in the age of digital data.

In fact, we’ve seen similar reform efforts in other industries; from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems streamlining resource allocation in the enterprise, to Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) making B2B transactions more standardized and efficient, and even recent efforts in the medical industry to address the security and privacy of health data with the Health Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Why is the advertising industry so late to the game?

- Mike Baker, CEO, DataXu

(**This piece was also posted on the MarketShare blog at Forbes.com: http://blogs.forbes.com/marketshare/2010/07/16/digital-advertising-efficiency-agencies-ad-networks/)
DataXu’s Mike Baker Makes the Rounds – 2 days, 3 Events
07/12/2010 | Categories: advertising, data, digital advertising, digital media, display advertising, events, media buying, online advertising, performance, Yahoo!
They say you can’t be everything to everyone, but for DataXu CEO Mike Baker you CAN be everywhere with everyone. Next week, Mike will be speaking at 3 different industry events.

12:15 p.m. PT, Monday, July 19, 2010:

OMMA AdNets – Los Angeles, CA

An annual OMMA event, this year’s OMMA AdNets seeks to uncover the value in the many layers of the digital advertising ecosystem. Mike will be speaking on a pre-lunch panel, at 12:15 p.m. PT, titled “Simplify the Stack: Fighting the New Cost and Complexity of Media Buying.” Moderated by David Szetala, CEO, Clix Marketing and joined by panelists from Razorfish, Click Forensics and Catalyst, Mike will discuss strategies for improving the efficiency of the media buying process.

7:00 p.m. PT, Monday July 19, 2010:

Dapper Fixing Advertising Panel – Los Angeles, CA

Co-hosted by the Rubicon Project, Fixing Advertising Los Angeles will explore the tremendous changes and opportunities in display advertising today as innovations in user data, intelligent media buying, and dynamic creative drive new efficiencies and performance gains – at a remarkable scale. The panel will also take a deep dive into the ways that the new data-driven ecosystem is affecting publishers, including insights into which data is owned by publishers, how well they are represented by supply-side platforms and whether or not they are capturing enough of the value chain. The panel will be moderated by Peter Kim, General Manager, Yahoo! Smart Ads, and joining Mike as panelists will be executives from The Rubicon Project, Triggit and more.

2:30 p.m. CT, Tuesday, July 20, 2010:

Right Media Open – Chicago, IL

Yahoo’s Right Media Open is an annual event that brings together online advertising leaders to share insights and discuss industry challenges. This year’s event will be keynoted by Terence Kawaja, Managing Director, GCA Savvian and Randall Rothenberg, President & CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Mike will be on a panel alongside executives from Cadreon, MEC and MediaBank to discuss the question, “How Are Agencies Evolving to Meet the Digital Future?”

Stay tuned for additional insights, content and recaps from these events.
DataXu MarketPulse: “Beyond Audience: What Drives Campaign Performance?”
06/28/2010 | Categories: data, demand side platform, DSP, MarketPulse, online advertising, performance, real-time bidding, RTB, trends
Today we published the second issue of the DataXu MarketPulse, a research newsletter designed to highlight trends in digital advertising based on DataXu’s own proprietary data.

In this month’s issue, we explored campaign performance and the impression attributes that are most highly correlated with conversions and the results were surprising!

DataXu MarketPulse, June 2010

Beyond Audience: What Drives Campaign Performance?

Since the dawn of the Internet, advertisers have been on a quest for the holy grail of digital advertising: delivering the right ad to the right consumer at the right time. This quest has yielded great insights about how to improve each of these ad dimensions. Consumer targeting is the current priority for some high-profile ad agency holding groups. But which factor is the most important driver of a campaign’s success?

With real time bidding (RTB), advertisers can get closer to the answer than ever before. Impression level data essentially maps the path to the grail. At MarketPulse, we like to look past the hype and let the data do the talking.

With 100s of millions of impressions served daily, we recently evaluated whether consumer, context, or creative attributes of ad impressions were most predictive of conversions.

The result? Each category was well represented, but creative attributes were the winner — correlating most highly with conversions for 48% of the campaigns.

“The data shows that a single campaign performance driver cannot be predicted with confidence in advance. This suggests that a more effective ‘media plan’ is one that instead responds to the nuanced, unique data each campaign generates. The implication is that brands and their agencies need systems that can glean the data and automatically adapt, rather than relying on a rigid, one-size-fits-all approach,” noted Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu.

Our analysis included nineteen large-scale, online display campaigns that ran for at least four weeks, across the leading RTB ad exchanges. In each campaign, we evaluated multiple impression attributes in the categories of consumer (who saw the ad), context (where the ad appeared), and creative (what the ad looked like) to see which attributes appeared most consistently across ad impressions that preceded conversions.

For additional results and takeaways from this month’s MarketPulse, you can download the pdf: DataXu MarketPulse_Campaign Performance Drivers_June 2010

DataXu’s MarketPulse explores the data that defines today’s digital advertising marketplace. Sign up here to have future MarketPulse newsletters delivered directly to your inbox.
Agencies Grapple with Ad Technology and its Place in a Services Business
06/25/2010 | Categories: advertising, data, data driven decisioning, demand side platform, digital media, DSP, innovation, media buying, media efficiency
There’s been a wave of innovation in online advertising over the past year; new ad technology made just for ad buyers (DSPs) are quickly gaining traction as a way to improve media effectiveness and realize operational efficiencies. DSP’s give agencies a powerful new tool, but the emergence of “buy side technology” is forcing them to grapple with a tricky new issue: how best to build a new technology core into an old services business model.

Some agencies have decided that forming strategic partnerships with external technology providers is the way to go. Others believe that the best strategy is to try to develop the technology themselves. While it’s too early to conclude the winning approach, this is an issue that smart clients will monitor as the digital era marches on because it will affect not only agency performance, but also the basic economic structure of the agency-client relationship.

In-house ad tech
The in-house technology approach is probably best embodied by WPP, with its 2007 acquisition of ad network and technology firm 24/7 Real Media. Since the acquisition, WPP has done a nice job of using these assets to grow an internal innovation engine known as MIG (Media Innovation Group). In a recent interview, MIG’s Brian Lesser explained some of the reasons for their continued investment in proprietary ad technology:
- More holistic media strategy – can alleviate issues that result from a fragmented media buying approach and result in a more efficient media spend.
- Data-driven marketing – integration of client data throughout the agency’s decision-making process informs the marketing strategy and results in more valuable insights to guide the clients’ campaigns.
- Less data exposure – with in-house ad technology, proprietary data is pushed solely through an agency’s platform and is thus able to be leveraged exclusively by the agency.
Third party ad tech
Alternatively, Publicis and Omnicom have weighed in as favoring partnerships with external ad technology providers. Curt Hecht of Publicis’ Vivaki business unit recently discussed with AdExchanger their partnership with Internet giant Google, which includes use of Google’s new “house DSP” Invite Media (acquired by Google last month). And Omnicom’s Randall Weisenburger explained to ClickZ that they have opted against building an in-house DSP because of the vast benefits technology partners can provide to clients:
- Greater access to innovation – when agencies partner with outside technology vendors, they can innovate more quickly and better align with client needs.
- Focus on core competence – agency resources can be focused on larger strategic considerations that are core to the agency.
- Less risk of agency bias in media buying decisions – advertisers can be confident that an agency’s recommended technology strategy will not be influenced by an in-house proprietary service.
Ultimately, these different approaches are still very new and only time will tell what truly makes the most sense for the agency and for its clients. But just as advertisers want to know about an agency’s creative approach, it’s now best practice to dig into their technology roadmap.

- Mike Baker, CEO, DataXu

(**This piece was also posted on the MarketShare blog at Forbes.com: http://bit.ly/d0hEX3)
Hyper Target without Sacrificing Scale: DataXu Introduces Audience Optimization
06/22/2010 | Categories: audience buying, audience insights, audience optimization, audience targeting, campaign parameters, data, demand side platform, DSP, impressions, performance, real-time bidding, RTB, target audience, targeting, third party data
As digital moves from the fringe to the core of most media plans, marketers are looking for more effective ways to engage the online consumer. From traditional demographic targeting to social influencers to search intenders, finding your audience and delivering the right message is key. Third party data enables advertisers to more precisely target their audience, but advanced targeting techniques can also have the unwanted effect of limiting campaign reach and scale.

Today, we announced our Audience Optimization program that allows advertisers to easily integrate proprietary and 3rd party data into the DataXu system for advanced audience targeting, optimized campaign performance and sophisticated audience insights.

What makes DataXu’s Audience Optimization unique is actually the same thing that makes DataXu unique, our proprietary learning system.

Unlike other DSPs, DataXu is able to not only target specified audience segments, but actually learn the most effective combinations of creative and context within those segments and apply those learnings to extend the campaign beyond the originally defined audience segment. This solves the scale problem that plagues pure play audience buying strategies. DataXu’s real-time bidding system then uses a variable-pricing model to “bid down the curve” or value impressions relative to how closely they resemble the optimal performance patterns.

Here’s how it works in practice: a financial services company is looking to target 34-54 year old males with a high household income for a new “retirement product.” Their media plan projects a target audience of 2 million consumers online, but with the specific campaign parameters in play, they are able to reach only 250,000 unique impressions initially.

Using DataXu, the advertiser can then run an Audience Optimized flight across an additional 1.75 million uniques, all of which resemble the consumers that are converting on the offer. The Audience Optimized flight is built from impression- level data and web site activity and predicts which combination of consumer, ad creative and context signals are most likely to result in a conversion – pattern matching from our learning system. The media is valued and purchased, and creative selected, based on how closely the pattern resembles the target audience conversions.

For more about our new Audience Optimization capabilities, see the full press release here: http://www.dataxu.com/news/audience_optimization.php or contact us at sales@dataxu.com.

-Mike Baker, CEO, DataXu