DataView: The DataXu Blog
Category: online advertising
- The Great CTR Debate: DataXu’s Perspective
08/26/2010 | Categories: data, online advertising, trendsDarren 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 MarketPulse: “Last Click Attribution: A Simple Way to Misallocate Your Budget”
07/28/2010 | Categories: data, digital advertising, MarketPulse, media buying, online advertising, trendsToday, 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
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, trendsDigital 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, trendsToday 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.
- DataXu is the Online Advertising Winner in the 2010 MITX Technology Awards
06/10/2010 | Categories: awards, digital media, innovation, MITX, online advertisingWe won! Last Wednesday evening, a group of DataXu’ers including 2 of our founders, Sandro Catanzaro and Bill Simmons, attended the ceremony for the MITX (Massachusetts Interactive Technology Exchange) Technology Awards. We were finalists in the ‘Online Advertising” category alongside strong competitors Nexage, BuySellAds.com and Searchandise Commerce. And we won!
Co-founder Bill Simmons said it best “Since our public launch just last September, our team has been working nonstop to continue innovating our platform and growing our company; this recognition from MITX, New England’s leading interactive business and digital media association, makes all the hard work more than worth it.”
The full press release is available here: http://www.dataxu.com/news/MITX_award_win.php
We’re absolutely ecstatic about this honor, as the picture below from http://www.facebook.com/MITX.ORG shows.
Sandro Catanzaro, VP of Products, and Bill Simmons, VP of Technology, show off their shiny new MITX award.
- We’re MITX Finalists and Yes, We’ll Answer Questions…
05/20/2010 | Categories: awards, innovation, MITX, online advertisingA few weeks ago, the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX) announced their finalists for the MITX 2010 Technology Awards, and we were thrilled to be chosen as a finalist in the “online advertising” category.
The MITX Technology Awards recognize innovative technologies developed in the New England area, as well as the individuals and organizations responsible for driving these advancements. Having launched only 8 months ago, just being given the opportunity to compete is an honor and privilege.
As a MITX finalist, we were interviewed for the MITX “What’s Next” blog and the post was published today. The full post is available here and embedded below is the slideshow of our Q&A.
Stay tuned for updates from the awards ceremony on Wednesday, June 2nd. Fingers crossed!
View more presentations from MITX. - Welcome to the DataXu Blog
09/14/2009 | Categories: ad impressions, ad optimization, data, dynamic bidding, MIT, online advertising, real-time bidding, RTBHi, and welcome to the DataXu blog. On this blog, the DataXu team and I will share our take on online advertising and its future. Big things are happening. Specifically, the advent of “real time bidding” on individual ad impressions is happening, and it is set to revolutionize online advertising for agencies and brands. That transformation will be a large part of our focus here.
I’ve been in the industry for a long time now and have seen one advancement after another, but in my view nothing before compares to what is going to happen in the months ahead and the transformative effect real-time bidding will have on the advertising industry. I expect a couple of years from now we’ll all look back and shake our heads in amazement at what passes for online advertising management today.
Who and what is DataXu you ask? We are a Boston-based company launching today with a real-time online advertising optimization platform. Our core technology was developed by my co-founders, an MIT aerospace professor and his PhD students. Its original purpose was to quickly sort through massive quantities of data (what they humbly refer to as a “complex combinatorial space”) in support of NASA’s Mars Mission planning. DataXu’s founders – from the distinct but highly data-driven worlds of aeronautics and online media – recognized a unique opportunity to apply these analytic innovations to improve upon the current inefficiencies of online media placement. In the words of John Wanamaker (who many consider the father of modern advertising), “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” We’re out to solve that problem.
As a starting point for our conversations here, I thought it would be helpful to briefly discuss what we mean by real-time bidding. As you likely know, the first generation of ad exchanges has operated for several years now and relies on the use of “static bidding,” which allows an advertiser to list a bid price and receive impressions by the thousand that meet the bid. The new generation of ad exchanges—being led by Google and Yahoo—is all about real-time bidding, which replaces the static bidding paradigm with dynamic bidding at the impression level.
This means that an ad buyer, for the first time, can automatically review and differentially value each individual opportunity to buy an ad impression in real time, while a consumer browses the web .The ability to buy advertising in this manner will result in a dramatic efficiency gain for buyers and sellers alike (that’s right, less manual media management!). With our platform, advertisers can greatly increase their ability to drive sales and other web conversion actions.
There is obviously much more for us to talk about in regard to DataXu and the industry overall, and you probably have a lot of questions about where this is all headed. Hopefully you’ll visit this blog often to ask those questions, and share in the discussion about where online advertising is going. In the meantime, please visit our web site often to hear more about what we’re up to. Stay tuned. We will dive deeper into the online advertising market and technologies in future posts.
Thanks for reading. I look forward to continuing the conversation.
Mike Baker, President & CEO
