Sponsored by Advertising.com Group

Brand advertising is inextricably tied with the challenge of telling brand stories to consumers in compelling and memorable ways.  Digital display advertising is evolving to meet and even redefine this challenge with new platforms and consumer interaction models.  This session will offer a portfolio of case studies where marketers are beginning to leverage social media, natural user interfaces, and evolving devices to engage consumers with their brand stories.  We will also take a peek into the near future on what technologies hold real promise for driving the evolution in the online landscape.

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The display ad marketplace is consumed by machine-made acronyms like RTB, DSP, DMP, but isn’t the most important one really UX (short for user experience) – you know, people? Are we becoming an industry of machines talking to machines, or will the human factor – the people making and receiving the ads – remain the focus of online display advertising. Recent research indicates more than half of all display ad buys are driven by some sort of technology vs. good old-fashioned people-to-people direct selling. Will this trend continue? Or will people rise against the machines.

Media buying technology and operations are undergoing a dramatic transformation — marketers are replacing traditional relationship marketing tactics and opaque ad networks with programmatic media buying that includes transparent ad exchanges and audience targeting. These new options give interactive marketing professionals what they crave — better targeting, less waste, more efficiency, and better results. However, marketers who don’t take an active role in managing this new form of media buying will pay the price, either by dealing with inefficient buyers reluctant to abandon the old model or by ceding control to a demand-side platform (DSP) or central trading desk without entirely understanding its methodologies. This session will discuss this industry-wide trend, and give digital marketers some practical advice on how to make best use of the opportunity.

Targeting technology be damned. Context, impact, immersiveness, share of voice still matter, many publishers argue. Premium content has embraced the push down and large fixed panels among the OPA Ad Units. Marquee brands are starting to invest in the IAB’s Rising Stars formats. And the new app ecosystem has helped reinvigorate sponsorship models. But how effectively are publishers pushing back against the banner-spewing, audience-buying juggernaut to preserve their place within the digital marketplace? How are the buyers evaluating the cost and effectiveness attached to these new custom display opportunities, and how are they integrating them into a larger marketing mix?

Talk about the increased “brand metrics”, enhanced “targeting” and new “transparency” all you want, the audience-targeting machine developed in recent years is still aimed at direct marketing goals. Marketers talk a good line about valuing brand lift, but they still gauge performance principally by clicks. Creative executions in networked display advertising are aimed at conversions. Getting the “right ad, in front of the right person at the right time” is a lower-funnel formula aimed at making the sale, not building brand equity, not telling a story, and certainly not capable of pulling big brand dollars from the mother lode of brand budgets – TV. Hasn’t this industry built a huge, costly, complex set of technologies that continues to consign online display to a DM role? 

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You can't buy and evaluate what you can't measure, and so ad attribution and analytics have become the next great opportunity for the digital display economy. Online measurement has become a big and growing business, and as tracking have moved across offline and online channels the combination of companies and M&A have an impact on what and how we determine ad performance. A veteran of the digital investment space Linda Gridley explore the key theme in this space, where the industry is headed and which players may prove disruptive as measurement evolves.

Much of the traffic that was going to long tail blogs and other social media sites several years ago is now going to the new gorilla in in the market, Facebook. But is this good for advertisers? Facebook arrived in 2010 to become the largest inventory of display advertising on the Web, and in 2011 a more proportionate share of the ad spend began to arrive too. With a majority of online users in the social network, now all targetable by a unique set of parameters, marketers have to consider it in the plan, don’t they? But with its style of creative, targeting and metrics, does this opportunity get along with the rest of the marketing mix? Can social display inform and enhance a larger marketing plan? Are media buyers moving budget away from other display buys to enter this arena, and how does ROI in the social network compare to returns from the new ad tech machine being built outside of Facebook? Should you be in or out of the social display party?

Despite many a pronouncement that the Web is only good for direct response advertising, brands are in fact interested in spreading awareness online. Video, not display, will be the vehicle that takes them there. Similar in execution to TV, where brands feel safest, video enables the storytelling that connects brands with consumers, but with the added benefits of enhanced targeting, measurability and interactivity. As the current growth-driver in online advertising, video is the channel most buyers are interested in, yet the same old problems of scale, standardization and a much smaller ad load keep TV dollars from coming online en masse. However, at 50% year-over-year growth, video’s surge comes at the expense of another channel: display. Whatever its logistical problems, online video is closer to the display advertising brand marketers really wanted online, anyways.  

Real time bidding was the growth story of 2011. Demand side platforms have seen quick uptake of technologies that purport to match the right ad to the right user viewing any given page but promise a better price for publishers. But more than a year into the RTB craze, what are the good examples that illustrate and clarify how these campaigns work successfully? We ask some of the buyers and solutions providers most experienced with RTB to share details from actual campaigns. How were goals defined and then mapped against the available data sets? How were sites targeted and checked for brand safety? How were exchanges chosen? Were did optimization take advantage of the real-time nature of the process to improve performance over time. And finally how did all that work pay off for clients? And when and why does it fail? In this final session of OMMA Display we clarify and demystify the RTB process with practice rather than theory.