Commentary

Digital Media Optimization - The Advertising Afterthought

For big brands and large advertisers, digital media affects maybe 10% of their media budget...on a good day. Yet it seems that every other day some mad algorithm scientist comes up with a new way to optimize digital advertising. Or some cunning entrepreneur fueled by venture capital devises a new media exchange that further streamlines the intrinsic inefficiencies in advertising.

The most fashionable of this technology-forward lot are the media attribution alchemists, experimenting with different media combinations to discover a repeatable formula for gold. If television advertising isn't considered in the media optimization mix, does it really matter?

The search engine keyword marketplace was the first advertising media market designed to be efficient. Because it is auction-based, it treats advertising media like financial derivatives. There exists a wide variety of powerful technologies to optimize the paid search channel.

All of them, in one form or another, borrow from the esoteric technologies that originally were developed for financial securities trading. That sounds like a highly optimized market.

The online display industry thinks it now has the edge over its search brethren because of display media's dual strengths -- a TV-like branding power and keyword marketplace-like efficiency. The industry even measures itself like TV by using reach and frequency as its main metrics.

And if all that weren't enough, online display technologies now allow for, behavioral targeting, audience segmentation and search-driven re-targeting. All those words and concepts sound so optimized. With search marketing and online display humming along at unparalleled levels of efficiency within their respective channels, the digital ad industry has turned its innovative attention to cross-channel technology to find and create incremental optimization opportunities.

Numerous studies have shown that display ads help to increase by as much as 20% the number of searches conducted on search engines for the brand and/or product being advertised. It is these types of studies that helped drive the initial development and increasing adoption of media attribution systems. Arguably the trendiest notion in all of digital advertising, media attribution is intended to assign the impact that a specific creative within a media channel had on producing the vaunted "conversion goal" (an actual sale or a brand interaction).

The idea is that by assigning the right amount of credit to each marketing event that led to a conversion, marketers can devise marketing plans with repeatable steps toward success and efficiently allocate media budgets based on the relative impact that each media channel contributed to the goal. That sounds like advertising's ultimate goal.

However, there are a few huge roadblocks in the way.

The vast majority of search marketing campaigns are run in silos, with SEO teams and PPC teams essentially competing against each other. To this day, very few agencies and advertisers operate their organic and paid search teams as one cohesive group in order to identify cannibalization points and look for synergistic opportunities. They eat each other's performances.

If the the SEO wizards and the PPC day traders still can't get along, how does the digital ad sector expect online display and search marketing to optimize nicely together?

That question becomes secondary when digital advertising looks up from its collective navel and remembers that television advertising still accounts for up to 90% of large advertisers' media budgets. The vast majority of media attribution systems available on the market focus solely on digital media, making digital advertising's trendiest technology only 10% relevant to big brands.

If digital advertising does not view the inclusion of television advertising data in the media optimization mix as de rigueur, we will continue to be perceived as navel-gazers by the other 90% of the advertising industry. We will continue to optimize in a 90% vacuum and remain the advertising afterthought.

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