Is TV Advertising Ready for Self-Service Auctions?
Bill Wise, CEO of Did-it,”a New York-based firm specializing in auctioned media management,” according to his byline in Mediapost, says there’s no reason brand advertising campaigns on TV shouldn’t adopt the same self-service auction approach as eBay or Google (Mediapost).
“The TV networks, meanwhile, are not happy. An article in last week’s Wall Street Journal nicely covered the networks’ displeasure. Members of the TV world put forth a number of arguments why they think the system won’t work“
The TV execs Wise sites talk about custom integration, product placement, and campaign packaging — campaign features that are difficult to automate — as reasons the approach won’t work for TV. There’s another: Finding appropriate context in a fragmented media world. As customers fan out across a more diverse and diffuse media landscape, marketers need scale; marketers need partners or platforms that provide media-buying efficiency that matches the old days of spending $10 million across a handful of networks. Ad networks and syndicated paid search are both good at scale. But brand advertisers, to a much greater extent than direct-response or paid-search marketers, care about context, and even the best contextual ad-serving technologies still miss the mark too often (see ChasNote 8/12/06) to kill off the humans just yet.
Chas,
I couldn’t agree more! Brand advertising doesn’t fit with the current scalable targeting models. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a scalable system that would work for brands, but it would require a reevaluation of targeting models.
The idea of creating a bid market makes a lot of sense. How else are brands going to set a price for displaying their art in content? They can’t have an upfront for 100 channels on cable that’s efficient; I doubt they can for an infinite web.
The problem is you need the brand marketers to bid to set a price for display because each site displaying brand ads is truly unique in its value to the brand. With transactional, display on a site is worth exactly the marginal value from acquiring transactions regardless of the context (in most cases). For brand advertising display within various contexts has very different value, even if the viewing demographic is the same. And I certainly agree contextual relevancy isn’t the answer. But there are other types of relevancy…
Right on, Joe! I’m a big fan of relevancy in advertising too; I just don’t yet have confidence that bots alone will get it right.