2013 will be the year of ad-viewability. Happy new year!
- Published on Friday, 18 January 2013 17:08 In category: Alenty news
Don't be too quick to shelve old-fashioned advertising
- Published on Monday, 07 January 2013 10:32 In category: Market news
With the Internet, new forms of advertising are invented on a daily basis. Interactions, engagement, choice... are the keys to modern marketing.
It's true, all this makes for an advertising revolution, making advertising more acceptable, perhaps enjoyable, even desirable in itself!
But let's not forget the real purpose of advertising.
One of my first clients at NetValue was François-Xavier Hussherr, who was then writing a thesis on advertising efficiency. I was surprised to find that Cicero was quoted in the introduction to his thesis.
Yet in fact it's fairly obvious: advertising is born of rhetoric, the art of persuasion.
Persuasion of what? To buy a product that may be (in increasing order of the persuasiveness required):
- interesting
- useful
- amusing
- new
- like all others
- too expensive
- useless.
According to the product, we see that smart strategies (for brand engagement) or simply advertising hype may be used.
The better the product, the greater the leeway for trying out new forms of advertising. We take fewer risks by seducing consumers with a diamond panther that a box of washing powder. I'm not saying it's impossible, simply that it would be harder for the bulk of the budget of washing powder manufacturers to shift to smarter advertising forms.
Let's take another example, a service we generally only rarely need: windscreen replacement. The advertiser simply needs to ensure that, when the time comes, the customer is exposed to an ad and turns to this company. Most of us have relatively little experience in windscreen replacement, and therefore know little of the competition. The company that comes to mind in the two days following the incident gets the business.
It is not always necessary to use innovative, original or "engaging" communication strategies...
Ads therefore still remain a battle between an advertiser and a consumer: persuading the consumer to buy something he doesn't want. And despite ourselves, our brain's mechanisms have not changed much since Cicero: knowing, understanding, feeling...
So yes, the Internet innovates and sometimes makes advertising less stupid. But that's not to say you won't still see simplistic messages relentlessly hammered at you!
Real Time Bidding and frequency
- Published on Thursday, 13 December 2012 14:03 In category: Market news
As all media planners know, frequency management is one of the main problems of adpurchasing.
Why? Because classic purchases do not allow efficient frequency management. This iswhat I like to call the overlapping sticking plasters concept.
When you want to reach a target, you select the programmes/sites/magazines (accordingto the chosen medium) that show the greatest affinities with your target.
Your scheduling tool gives you the contact accumulation rate and their common shareof media. Based on this information, it estimates the average frequency that should beachieved. And according to your goals, you will opt for a media plan that attempts to getthe best of both worlds in terms of cover and frequency, capped by a necessarily limitedbudget.
The problem is that each time you want to reach an individual again, you will also reachnew individuals who have not yet been exposed to the campaign.
This problem even occurs on the internet, a medium I will now take as an example.
The sticking plasters diagram below illustrates what happens when we want to achieve afrequency of 4 views by buying ad space on 6 different websites.
You can see that with this method, a very small number of individuals are exposed to thetargeted optimum of 4 views.
I already wrote about this a year ago: only 5 to 10% of contacts in a media plan areexposed to the optimum!
Yet ad exchanges offer new possibilities. We often hear of retargeting to improveconversion rates or click-through rates. But we forget that this mechanism can also be
used for classic media purchases. And over and above its benefits in terms of targeting, itis a revolution in online frequency management.
Thanks to retargeting, we can overlap sticking plasters in such a way that frequency isperfectly controlled. This extends far beyond capping, which is simply a way of restrictingrepetition. It is a dynamic frequency management method.
To take my sticking plaster analogy, this is what we end up with. Using a few websitesselected for their affinity with the target (we could use other targeting means), wecontinue to serve ads to the same individuals until the optimum is reached.
Graphically, this is how that would look:
You can see here that the number of contacts exposed 4 times is far higher than in theprevious version. And this success was achieved by buying fewer ads!
The internet is a medium with which we are able to manage ad serving on a unitary basis.And the possibilities of ad exchanges greatly boost this medium's potential. This is onlythe start of the revolution...
Viewability metrics and iFrames
- Published on Monday, 22 October 2012 10:11 In category: Market news
Ad viewability has (at last!) become a key issue in online advertising. There's even talk of a standard being used to pay for, and only for, ads viewed.
But to do so, measurements need to be reliable, very reliable. And although one might think it would be easy to measure viewability in the best of cases, experience has shown that in reality, it's a lot more complicated!
And iFrames are one (but not the only) difficult case to handle.
An iFrame is a page within a webpage. Like all pages, it can be generated by any domain name, including a domain name different from that of the page containing it.
This is where all the interest and difficulty of iFrames lie. An iFrame cannot freely communicate with the page in which it is embedded if the pages are not served by the same domain. And more's the better: the aim is to protect visitors' privacy. For instance, the page may know where the visitor has come from (referrer), while the iFrame does not. The page knows where the iFrame is, the iFrame doesn't...
An iFrame is a sort of safe, whose security is guaranteed by the browser.
So there's no point in looking for security gaps to obtain information, they would be immediately corrected.
I often use this metaphor: you're locked in a room without any windows and are asked to guess the size of the building in which the room is located. Either you have a pneumatic drill and you break a hole in the wall, or you look for a radically different method. For instance, you get out your mobile, locate your position and look up the satellite photo of the building on Google Maps.
To measure the viewability of ads in iFrames, it's just the same. We need to find smart, robust methods. And, just to complicate things, these methods may be different for each browser.
Alenty started to measure ad viewability in 2008. And we didn't wait for the recent controversy to arise to tackle this problem. Since 2009, we've been using an array of solutions to cover the majority of cases.
Alenty measures ad viewability even in iFrames.
To check the reliability of a viewability metrics provider, take a look into their success rate. This rate indicates the percentage of ads correctly measured. Here at Alenty, we are often above the 95% mark (because not only iFrames need monitored). Our quality assurance procedure is very strict: we prefer to deliver one figure (and therefore not charge for it) than providing potentially erroneous data.
Last summer, a client in the US compared Alenty to three of the main viewability metrics providers. For the same ad spaces, the success rates were respectively:
- Alenty: 98.7%
- Other providers: 71%, 67% and 47% respectively.
Each comparative test gave the same results.
If your provider doesn't give you their success rate (they may not even know it if they don't have a quality assurance platform), there's an easy way you can estimate it.
Have the same ad spaces measured by Alenty and another provider and compare the viewability rates obtained. If a provider cannot measure an ad, they cannot be sure it was viewed. This proportionately decreases the viewability rate.
With the following acronyms:
- SR: Success Rate
- VR: measured Viewability Rate
- RVR: Real Viewability Rate
the real viewability rate can be estimated using the following formula:
RVR = VR/SR
This real rate is independent of the provider, so we can say that:
Alenty VR/Alenty SR = Provider VR/Provider SR
So: Provider SR = Provider VR * Alenty SR/Alenty VR
This rate is critical: a 50% success rate underestimates viewability by half. A site cannot consider halving its saleable impressions!
Worse still, this rate is not constant: certain sites may have a high success rate and others a far lower rate (because they use iFrames more often). The viewability rates obtained are therefore not comparable. As a buyer, you risk picking a poor site because your viewability metrics provider has a better success rate, over a good site with a poor provider success rate! Talk about absurd...
Buyers cannot base their ad space purchases on variable success rates.
Don't believe sales pitches or supposedly scientific white papers. Compare them objectively and make up your own mind.
Who owns cookies?
- Published on Friday, 13 July 2012 08:25 In category: Market news
The question of cookie ownership is likely to keep some legal experts occupied for a long time to come.
Here we illustrate this with a three-party example: the advertiser, the adserver and the website. And even in this simplified scenario, things are a bit of a shambles...
In this example, the advertiser buys ad space on the website and the ad is delivered by the adserver. So far, so good.
The cookie itself is placed on the user's computer either by the website or by the adserver. Let's suppose (once again to simplify things) that these cookies only contain a unique ID (one for the website and another for the adserver). The ownership of such a cookie is quite straightforward: it belongs to the party that placed it there.
Here we won't dwell on website cookies (too simple to be worth discussing here): these cookies are used to count unique visitors to the website, are placed by the website and belong to the website. End of story.
Adserver cookies, however, do not stand alone. They are linked to information that is not (usually) stored on the visitor's computer (in their cookie), but on adserver computers. And it is this linked information that can be problematic.
The adserver (to provide the service it offers) records the fact that "the cookie was exposed to the advertiser's campaign on the website".
In fact, it is this link between a cookie and additional information that is of particular value, and is worth taking a closer look at.
The website says "this information has been collected by displaying an ad on my pages; it therefore belongs to me and cannot be reused".
The advertiser says "I'm the one that paid for this ad, so the information belongs to me".
The adserver says "I'm the one that managed this information, so I get my say".
In fact, this information should be broken down:
- the cookie visited the website
- the cookie was exposed to the advertiser's campaign.
These two pieces of information are quite distinct and should be able to be used distinctly.
"The cookie visited the website" is information that the website is entitled to control. It would be easy to target its visitors to sing the merits of a competitor site.
But the website should not have any right over the information "the cookie was exposed to the advertiser's campaign".
This information doesn't only involve this website: campaigns are run on several websites. What's more, this information doesn't contain any reference to the website; it therefore cannot be used to target its visitors for instance.
This information therefore belongs to the advertiser, who should be able to use it freely; the advertiser delegates this thankless job to the adserver.
The adserver needs to request permission from the advertiser and the website to use one or other of these pieces of information. Yet as the adserver already has all this information, it can easily be suspected of using the information it holds.
One solution may be for a third party to only record that "the cookie was exposed to the advertiser's campaign", without any information about the website. In this case, this information alone should be able to be used without the website's permission. As to knowing what to do with it, I'll leave you in suspense a little longer...
In conclusion, it is the information linked to a cookie that is of particular value, and this information should be distinctly broken down so as to clearly determine who has the right to use it and for what purpose.
Laurent NICOLAS
Ad impression value
- Published on Monday, 25 June 2012 09:50 In category: Market news
Media value (i.e. the cost of blank advertising space sold by an advertising network) is decreasing while the price of associated data (user cookies, IP addresses, editorial context, campaign efficiency metrics...) is on the rise.
In some cases, the data is more expensive than the media!
Meanwhile, legislative authorities and "anti-Big Brother" movements are promoting the "right to be forgotten" and anonymity protection. In a previous article I wrote about how the services provided by sites need profitable business models, and how we risk penalising internet users by reducing the value of ads served to them.
The principle of RTB works as follows: when an auction begins, bidders have 120 milliseconds to estimate the impression's value and make a bid. This value is determined by the quantity of information available for this impression. A "blank" impression will therefore cost less than a rich media impression.
Cookies account for a considerable share of an impression's value. Retargeting systems will be eager to buy a well qualified cookie. And bids will rise.
So how do you generate the golden cookie? By visiting online retail sites, adding products to your basket, answering mini-questionnaires on your profile, starting to fill in consumer credit application forms... Your cookie will be entered into the databases of targeters, who'll pay good money to have the privilege of sending you their ad.
Some may take this as an ego boost. Yet we are still to establish the value of these cookies. If you know of a service able to estimate their value, please let us know in the comments section.
Others may take this as a way of getting their own back on the system by causing prices to climb so high that targeters will be uselessly burning up their cash.
Others still will use this technique to select the ads to which they will be exposed for the coming weeks. For instance, go onto an online lingerie store (check that the site uses retargeting with a tool such as Ghostery) and the pages you then visit will be delightfully adorned with scantily dressed women!
On the other hand, if you delete your cookies you are liable to be exposed to tacky and irrelevant ads.
So what about the websites in all that? Sadly, unless they get their piece of the pie from the data, the value of their cookie won't earn them much. The price paid to the site is that of the second bid, so two buyers need to bid for the site to get a higher CPM.
Even if data providers get the largest slice of the pie, a rich media impression will earn the site that displays it a little more... And so provide you with the service you use for free...
Laurent NICOLAS
All3D mobile advertising: Alenty measures recipe game application
- Published on Wednesday, 06 June 2012 14:28 In category: Alenty news
Alenty is taking part in the Miriad project, supported by the cluster "Images et Réseaux".
This project aims to explore new ad formats: video, mobile, 3D, interactive, etc.
Several experiments have already been carried out, in particular during the Transmusicales de Rennes music festival, which was the opportunity for us to test the compatibility of our metrics with mobile web apps.
This time, we’re taking things much further, by measuring a mobile 3D application.
This test is based on a game, named “Bien dans votre assiette”, in which users are plunged into a three-dimensional kitchen. They have access to products (partner brands) and have to come up with a recipe. The best recipe will be selected by a jury.
Alenty is responsible for measuring the ad contact with each partner. And these contacts are far richer than simple user exposure. Application users handle the products. They are therefore immersed in an environment in which the brands are present.
Alenty has further developed its technology to measure this highly specific environment.
The experiment is underway, and you can install the application on your iPad or iPhone by clicking here.
As usual, our measurements are strictly confidential and anonymous. So you can try out this unique ad format with complete peace of mind. And if your recipe is selected, you could win one of many prizes!
