• by Skip Brand , April 9, 2013

Anthony Katsur, CEO of Maxifier, believes that in order to attract and keep brands online, we have to beat TV. Digital channels have formidable reach and scale, rich engaging ad units, and better pricing and attribution models than television. What we don’t have is the ease of use that media buying in that channel offers. 

A premium programmatic marketplace could solve that, but marketplaces today are built for RTB.  “And no matter what kind of lipstick you try to put on that pig, RTB is about remnant -- it's everyone's unsold inventory. It's the scraps,” says Katsur. There’s simply no programmatic marketplace that’s appropriate for premium inventory, supplying the right data and the right optimization technologies, ensuring right components are in place to actually support premium pricing and selling. RTB was designed for one purpose only, according to Katsur: “To acquire inventory for the lowest price humanly possible. And it was all built around DR.

“We will continue to have challenges moving brand budgets until we can, to some extent, duplicate the TV model that brands are accustomed to.  One of our greatest challenges is that our industry is trying to reinvent the vernacular. We’re not going to change 50+ years of buying culture with new terminologies and metrics. In that medium, look at television, the greatest attractor of brand dollars by far. Brands buy a specific, curated network, a target GRP, and perhaps a TRP within that,” Katsur explains. “There's no difference if you're creating a premium network online. You need great content curation, massive reach, and then within that massive reach, specific audience and scale.

Katsur further contends that we need to make purchasing premium inventory at least as easy as purchasing television and outdoor. Brand advertisers understand what their reach is. Their goals are to raise brand awareness and to increase brand and product recall. Katsur says, “These are core metrics that we need measure and optimize against if we want to capture those dollars. That's the language these advertisers speak today.” We've got to be able to deliver against traditional brand metrics.

We know those metrics are key to attracting brands. As an industry, we’re evolving and moving beyond the click and conversion to address metrics like engagement and viewability, but these are just the first steps down a much longer path. And certainly the introduction of IAB standard premium ad units is helping us move things along.

Katsur agrees that the ad unit itself plays an important role in this industry shift.  “The brand buyer is going to have to believe in the value of the unit, and will look for affinities with print, outdoor and television. In the example of a television commercial, a brand has 100% share of voice and 100% engagement for that 30-second spot. You've got to bring that same rich experience - that same share of voice and complete engagement - to dwell time.  A user’s dwell time on a publisher’s site has to translate to the currency they're used to, and they're used to buying TV.” Therefore, an online ad experience must to be comparable to an offline ad experience in terms of the impact and the value it delivers for a brand. Advertisers will favor big, rich units that engage users for an extended period of time.

He’s got some excellent points there, but it opens a can of worms: If we’re trying to measure brand KPIs as well as metrics like engagement, how do we optimize?  “Brand awareness, brand recall and brand lift or product awareness must be measured over time, and typically, connected to an offline data warehouse. That's a lot harder to measure,” notes Katsur. Online metrics like viewability, dwell time and share of voice can be measured in real time and used as a proxy for those offline KPIs such as awareness and lift. The ability to measure these is essential for a premium exchange. If a brand can measure 100% viewability or 100% share of voice, along with an on-page dwell time of a minute and a half, those are meaningful to CMOs. This is even more compelling if their ad is the only one on the page while the consumer was engaging with content during that 90-secnod period. Katsur adds, “It’s even more exciting if the ad was an engaging, rich media unit, a takeover, or integrated into the content. That's a really rich advertising experience, perhaps richer than television. This is the beginning of the end of the click. A horrible proxy to brand metrics.”

That branding experience can be even more efficient if it’s supported by quality audience data. According to Katsur, TV media buyers are making an inference: “’I'm buying on Family Guy to reach males 18-34 within this certain demographic.’ That may or may not be accurate. In digital, you can have a really engaging experience with great creative and excellent quantification of metrics – and simultaneously, accurately target the audience you want your brand to reach.”

It all makes sense. If we want to lure brand budgets away from television, we have to be better than television – but just as easy to buy. We already have the scale, the richness and better accountability. It’s just a matter of putting it all together.