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RSSThat this shift is an opportunity for premium vertical publishers like Weather.com, NYTimes.com, Forbes.com, Meredith and other members of the Online Publishers Association is self-evident. All of these folks have been doing very well selling their best premium environments, many times integrated with offline programs, at great rates. That will certainly continue, but that is not the big opportunity in front of them. Their best inventory -- the high-demand vertical and sub-vertical parts of their sites -- is typically scarce, so these programs never scale to the levels of spend that portals and platforms like Yahoo, MSN and AOL's Platform A can generate. It is unheard of for a premium vertical publisher to command 40% or 50% of a major brand advertisers' annual online spend, but it is quite typical for major portals to enter into partnerships like that with large brand advertisers.
So, what's the big opportunity? As has been well-documented, the major portals have been shifting their online ad focus away from perception-focused premium brand advertisers and more toward performance-focused marketers. We saw this first last year with Yahoo's integration of its sales teams around search. We saw this second with Microsoft's purchase of aQuantive, and its adoption of aQuantive's well-respected and quant-driven Atlas technology and team as the core of its online ad strategy. We saw this most recently with the events at AOL and its Platform A and the integration of its ad sales efforts.
Of course, these actions have been driven by fear of Google and its well-telegraphed efforts to use its search and contextual ad platform to dominate the online display ad market. I think that these folks are walking right into Google's lair -- trying to compete with Google on Google's terms -- and are making the delivery of premium brand programs a lesser and distant priority. I think that this will prove to be a mistake for Yahoo and AOL. At least Microsoft has a chance to make a fair fight of it, given its desktop franchise, its strong technology expertise and culture, and its unparalleled balance sheet. What should vertical publishers do? They should be focused on filling in this void. They should focus on ways to massively scale and upgrade the offerings that they take to agencies and clients.
No, I am not calling for another consortium. The one thing that we can be certain of here is that media consortia efforts will fail and are a massive waste of money, time, market focus and reputation. This is the time for one or more premium publishers to build a new, independent, business-aggregating, premium, vertical inventory and audience, backed by financial investors -- not strategic ones -- focused exclusively on financial success metrics, not strategic ones, and with the full freedom to operate in any market it wants without worrying about potential conflict or competition with any other sales channels.
Someone is going to fill this void. The market need is too great for it to be missed. The company or companies that fill this void may very well find the portals and platforms as ideal partners for their business, since these companies have scale and market-leading technologies, but are losing their premium sales channel positions. We are going to see a whole new round of coopetition and a new breed of frienemies. It's going to be fun to watch. What do you think?
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Premium verticals are the way to go! You're preaching to the choir.
I would add to your comments the topic of CPM vs. CPC vs. CPA pricing models. I believe the industry at large did itself a great disservice, when it went down the road of CPA pricing. Don't get me wrong -- advertising can and should be measurable, it's the beauty of the online medium. But that data should be shared and used to guide the campaign by all parties. The notion that a publisher be 100% responsible for success, when there are so many factors that contribute to a campaigns success or failure (brand quality, creative, offer, etc..), was and remains misguided.
A good advertising campaign (on or off-line) needs to be a partnership between the advertiser, the agency and the publisher. We're all in it together for the benefit of the brand. Just because we can "measure" effectiveness - does not mean the responsibilities have changed all that much. The Advertiser is still responsible for producing a good quality product at a fair price (and paying), the agency for devising a powerful campaign with excellent creative to communicate the products value and the publisher for putting that message in front of the right audience at the right time. Each party needs to be held accountable for their piece of these responsibilities. Excessive data has unfortunately led to a perceived shift in these responsibilities, and even in some cases has become a tool to shift credit or blame when a campaign works or does not. This is the result of the merging of technology and media. Both sides have it half right.
Premium publishers, agencies and clients understand this win-win concept and understand the value of their respective audience, creative talents and brands.
R.J. Lewis e-Healthcare Solutions
This is a quickly growing trend and a must-have for publishers in the future in both local and high value vertical markets like travel, health and finance. They can extend their reach and brand to new sites and create new opportunities for advertisers who want to buy ad networks - and avoid a lot of the garbage sites that run on ad networks today.
We also believe that big publishers must be responsible for their own destinies - they need to have the brand and the sales effort to succeed - and can't leave it to others to do it for them.
SyndiGO is working hard to make this business a reality - and meet the needs of both advertisers and leading publishers.