• by Jim Meskauskas , September 15, 2004

Are you working in an advertising agency, for a publisher, a rep firm, or any other manifestation of a marketing business? If you are, then you might not even have time to read this. You are as busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest... or a bouncer at a Bad Brains show.

So I will try to be brief.

Of course, some of the media that buyers and planners often look at, particularly in crunch time, when clients want buys yesterday and they want them cheap, can be found among online ad networks.

Just what constitutes an online ad network any more has morphed over the years as the industry itself has, but for the most part, their basic structure and nature is the same. A network is an aggregate of small-to-medium tier Web sites that have some commercial viability but are not necessarily capable of being sold on a stand-alone basis. Some networks also act as third-party resellers of distressed inventory for much larger tier-one sites (if you think Yahoo! can actually sell the entire inventory it generates itself using their fluid CPM pricing structure, you probably think Paris Hilton really lost her dog too).

Networks can be used in a lot of different ways, but among the best reason to buy them is to extend incremental reach and act as "fill" for a schedule.

The kind of reach I'm talking about, however, isn't simply demographic reach, though this would be a natural result, but psychographic reach. Networks can essentially play the role of what I like to call "psychographic spot fill" to an overall online media campaign.

The bulk of online advertising goes to the top 10 properties; sites like Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, Google, and the like receive most of the online advertising dollars. Certainly this is in no small part a function of these sites being more expensive than most others, but also, this is where the bulk of the online audience, at one time or another, finds itself.

But popularity of a media property based on total national audience aggregation can be misleading. Sometimes, an advertiser may have a national message meant for a national audience, but that audience isn't always found all in the same place. This is true for national network television, and most national advertisers' buying strategies reflect this fact by rounding out their television schedule with Spot TV. "Seinfeld" may have played really well with demographics in New York City, but buying "Seinfeld" does not mean those same demographics will be equally as well served in Dallas. Because of this, one buys spot fill in Dallas to shore up communication delivery against a certain demographic audience that isn't being reached to the same degree in one geographic center as another, even if the buy is a national buy.

Apply this same thinking to online buying, only think of it in terms of behavioral types rather than geography. If I'm selling snowboard, there are certainly people who will be interested that can be found in relevant areas of a Yahoo! or in AOL, but there are some people that can be identified behaviorally (psychographic) that aren't found with any regularity playing with the majors. They are instead to be found in the nooks and crannies of the World Wide Web. These people don't live at MSN or Yahoo! or Google, they visit those places. The places many people live are smaller sites that indulge an interest, an enthusiasm. They are "passion places" where the amount of time spent is more extensive and more meaningful and where an advertiser's message has the chance of picking up more cache with the audience.

Buying big sites like Yahoo!, AOL and her subsidiaries, and other tier-one branded media properties is the right thing to do, but it is not the only thing to do. People working in this industry appear to understand more than most people in marketing that we are highly fragmented, multi-media consumers. We talk often about the role the Internet can play in this embarrassment of niches. Yet by and large, agencies and their clients buy the same big sites with numbing repetition.

Applying the concept of psychographic spot fill to your media plans is the best way to maximize communicative value, and networks are one of the best media devices to use in accomplishing this. They have a significant role to play in caulking the chinks in most media plans' armor. Of course, they have to be used to be effective.