• by Russell Fradin , June 12, 2008

It's clear that advertisers today -- and the agencies that serve them -- have unmatched choices about how to spend their online advertising budget. In fact, we have too many choices as our audiences fragment throughout the Web to smaller and smaller niche sites. Furthermore, we need to deal with and take into account the hundreds of horizontal and vertical ad networks. How exactly should savvy advertisers accomplish their goals online?

Too often, we advertisers focus on the fact that online advertising is so deliciously measurable that we forget what it is we really want to measure. Because of this, we optimize for the wrong metrics, putting us on the wrong sites and networks. Would it meet your goal to have campaigns that have a wide reach but end up hurting your brand? Take low cost, direct response campaigns for example. It's great to spend low for each customer acquisition. However, if you are a high-end fashion brand, showing up on every site out there, including alongside questionable content in social media sites, could hurt your brand equity. Your goal may not be to reach as many potential buyers as can be.

One of our best "performing" campaigns was the one that generated the most emails and comments from people telling us they were so excited to see us associated with that content -- we didn't measure by clicks or conversions. This could be the same for a lot of marketers - all of our communities are definitely spending much of their time on niche sites, in the long tail. Because of this, advertisers need efficient ways to place campaigns on the right sites with the right quality, content and audience. The focus changes to conversations rather than conversions.

Campaigns with realistic direct response offerings and goals belong on networks that deliver broad reach and some sort of targeting (e.g. Advertising.com, TACODA). The two things direct response advertisers care about in this world are REACH and OPTIMIZATION. Exchanges offer more price transparency and some offer targeting as well - but they do not assess for quality, thought leadership and frequently updated content in the way that a person or company building their business based on premium properties will always do. All of these offerings monetize the unsold, remnant inventory of large sites and the exchanges may even include some long tail publishers.

You should be aware, however, that these performance networks and exchanges aren't interested in promoting your brands and tying into online communities - they are interested in delivering the lowest cost per action for your campaign. In fact, they can hurt your brands when you don't belong in the direct response category.

Campaigns with strong branding goals that want to promote and engage in a conversation about a product, service and lifestyle benefit from premier placements on premier properties developed by leaders attracting a dedicated audience - and these properties are overwhelmingly long tail sites. Brand advertising is about an experience - one we hope will engage the user - both online and offline. If your goal is to build awareness, affiliation, offline purchases and tap into the community that loves and promotes your products and services for you, then you have to be in the right place at the right time. Customers adore seeing brands they like on the content they choose to read online. Furthermore, our customers generally spend more time and consume more content from a lot more publishers on the web - more than we can reach through individual site buying. Vertical ad networks (IDG TechNet, Gay Ad Network, etc.) are the only way to ensure that the network cares as much about the quality of the publishers as the advertiser does because these media companies, Web 2.0 enterprises and individuals are building long-term businesses based on their ability to create a sustainable community of quality, on-topic properties that attract dedicated audiences.

Long tail properties attract target audiences because of their content and their personalities. Strong vertical ad networks (Martha's Circle, Forbes Business Blogger Network, Cyberhomes Vertical Advertising Network) share content, audience and advertising campaigns such that advertisers can count on the quality and consistency of the properties in the network. Every brand campaign can find the vertical ad network where the conversation about their brand, product, service or lifestyle is already in process. Advertisers and their agencies can rely on network builders for the quality of the properties in their community and should work with them on creative ways to engage both the thought leading publishers and their audiences.

There are going to be more and more vertical ad networks emerging to address the reality of continued fragmentation of audiences AND the engagement needs of brand advertising campaigns. Media buyers should be expected to identify one or more vertical ad networks for every branding campaign to add reach and increase share of voice on the exact properties where customers are thrilled to see them. That's the metric that matters for me.