The True Value of Media

With more transparent buying at the URL level via real-time bidding, and a renewed interest in native advertising, it will be hard for publishers to generate fictitious traffic and fool the buyer.

In a world where most brand advertisers are now looking for more than just click-based results, premium publishers and media sellers are under real pressure to deliver value, service, and performance. There has been renewed interest in high-value inventory such as in-view ads, low-clutter environments, and inventory free of suspicious engagement activity – such as bots or forced impressions.

I would say that brand advertisers never were interested in buying inventory that was riddled with malicious activity, phantom people engaging, or hidden inventory below the fold, within 0x0 iFrames or web pages that force consumers to bounce from one domain to another. But more than that, the methods for buying inventory created a scenario where the quality of inventory was harder to track and less transparent. Plus, the agencies representing the clients had a vested interest in not waking the sleeping giant of lower performance.

What do I mean by the sleeping giant? For years many of us have known of these suspicious activities used by publishers to drive up performance on campaigns, increase traffic to websites, and add more and more advertisements per page in order to generate higher revenues. These tactics have littered the Internet with web pages unfit for brands and whose only function is to prop up performance on campaigns being measured by clicks. Agencies have perpetuated these tactics by rewarding publishers based on last-click attribution and not looking to more traditional brand metrics to measure success.

Breaking the last-click habit is very hard since we’ve sold clients on the amazing performance we’ve achieved for them. Are we really going to go back and let them know that all the great performance we provided in the past was based on fake traffic, phantom users, and robotic clickers? And in addition, we’re now going to measure only legitimate traffic and the costs of media will be two or three times as much, with worse performance? As my old boss would say, “Whoopsie.”

There is hope for our industry though. With more transparent buying at the URL level via real-time bidding (RTB), and a renewed interest in native advertising – where advertisers are placing custom content directly within publisher pages – it will be very hard for publishers to generate fictitious traffic and fool the buyer. This is going to have a serious economic impact on media buys moving forward. Inventory that is “real,” has contextual quality, and delivers actual people will be worth significantly more than the robotic inventory that folks have been buying for the last few years. We should expect to see display inventory prices rise by three to four times and overall inventory availability to shrink dramatically.

Quality ad exchanges like Microsoft Ad Exchange have been militant about only providing inventory to buyers that meets the highest quality standards, is robot free, and showcases uncluttered pages with viewable inventory. To my knowledge, this is the first private marketplace that can stand the scrutiny of the new buyer who is focused on reaching real people in quality environments.

It will be interesting to see what happens to all the publishers who programmatically create content and force traffic across hundreds of domains to increase revenues. I believe they will be soon be called to the carpet and forced to choose between changing their ways or being left out in the cold. What do you think?

Image on home page via Shutterstock.

Subscribe to get your daily business insights

Whitepapers

US Mobile Streaming Behavior
Whitepaper | Mobile

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

5y

US Mobile Streaming Behavior

Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing habits. Streaming video, however, still comes with a variety of pesky frustrations that viewers are ...

View resource
Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups
Whitepaper | Analyzing Customer Data

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics for Media Groups

5y

Winning the Data Game: Digital Analytics Tactics f...

Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. You need more of it, all of which at higher quality, and all the meanwhile being compliant with data...

View resource
Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its people
Whitepaper | Digital Marketing

Learning to win the talent war: how digital marketing can develop its peopl...

2y

Learning to win the talent war: how digital market...

This report documents the findings of a Fireside chat held by ClickZ in the first quarter of 2022. It provides expert insight on how companies can ret...

View resource
Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy
Report | Digital Transformation

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Experience Economy

1m

Engagement To Empowerment - Winning in Today's Exp...

Customers decide fast, influenced by only 2.5 touchpoints – globally! Make sure your brand shines in those critical moments. Read More...

View resource