Move Over RTBs, the Hot Term of 2011 Is the AMP
By: Kathryn Koegel Published at AdAge: April 04, 2011
THE FORWARD 'I': The Advertising Option Icon
ADVERTISING OPTION ICON: A cute little "i" that can be put on ad
creative so consumers can find out how the data collected about them
is being used, and set various preferences. It's administered by
Evidon and a consortium of trade groups as part of an industry
self-regulation maneuver to keep Washington privacy advocates at bay
and protect the status quo of self-regulation.
AD BLOCKERS: Software enabled through a person's web browser that can
prevent ads from being displayed. Naturally, publishers aren't big
fans, as advertising is the primary revenue source underwriting online
content.
AD EXCHANGES: Wall Street-like commodity trading comes to web
advertising. Publishers designate inventory, buyers can access it. The
idea is that it creates a rational marketplace and automates the
tedious buying process, allowing publishers to set a "floor," or
minimum bid, for what types of ads they will accept, while buyers bid
for varying types of inventory available but rarely know in advance
where those ads will show up. There are pure exchanges where the
inventory is "blinded," and now publishers are in the game. The
Weather Channel has its own private exchange and a consortium of
Gannett, Hearst, The New York Times and the Tribune company run an
exchange through Quadrant One.
AD NETWORKS (and various permutations thereof): Audience Based: They
sell with the idea of aggregating users based on either demography or
intent (to purchase something).
Horizontal: Sells a wide base of inventory available, i.e., not specialized.
Vertical: Specialized. There are women's networks, sports networks,
networks of people in the market to buy a car, etc.
Mobile: Sells ads onto wireless devices including phones and now
tablets. There's more to it than just sales, as it takes work to get
one ad to appear on phones across multiple platforms (e.g., Android
and Apple). There are three big ones: Google (AdMob), Apple (formerly
Quattro) and Millennial (independent), plus some focused on rich media
or various verticals.
Performance: Clicks 'R Us. These networks have a wide range of
inventory available and are all about driving direct response at the
lowest possible price.
Video: The combo of sight, sound and motion is hot (and generates the
highest CPMs). Recently this space has been a land grab for more
generalized networks that are snapping up or merging with video
networks. They don't only aggregate video inventory against which to
run ads -- some also syndicate video content across a range of sites,
as there is not enough video inventory at the right price to meet
demand.
AD SERVERS: The technology that disseminates online ads and then
tracks and reports back on ad performance. DoubleClick/Google and
Microsoft Atlas are the leaders, along with "homegrown" servers --
which is when a site builds its own.
AD VERIFICATION: Software tools that advertisers use to determine if
impressions are displayed in the proper place and whether the ads are
privacy compliant. They are often used with exchange inventory when
the advertiser does not know exactly where the ads are placed or for
audience targeted buys to ensure "brand safety" -- that ads aren't on
pages with, say, boobs. The ad networks typically dislike verification
tools because networks say it's their job to find the right sites, and
they argue verification has technological limits. For example, they
say, if advertising for a woman's product shows up on a breast
cancer-related site, boobs may just be a perfect fit.
AGENCY-TRADING DESKS (ALSO MEDIA-BUYING PLATFORMS/DESKS OR DSPS): The
practice of an agency operating its own DSP so it can enrich its pool
of data from all the buys it executes. The bigger agencies are
building systems to look at data across media and frequency cap, i.e.
control the number of times a person is exposed to specific ad.
ANALYTICS: There are three different kinds:
1. Third-party panel-based companies, such as ComScore and Nielsen,
can tell you who actually looks at a site. The publishers always argue
that they are being undercounted due to the complexity of the web and
the difficulty of getting reliable metrics for smaller sites.
2. First-party software tools, such as Google Analytics, Omniture and
Webtrends, operate through tags on a site's pages and let publishers
get statistics on how many page views a site is generating and how
many unique users it has (a machine proxy for people/viewers). Their
numbers never match up to third-party tools due to issues such as
cookie deletion, and both groups argue about their data reliability.
3. Audience targeting is basically behavioral targeting with new
clothes and broader capabilities and applications. It's the practice
of using data to imply an audience, either by demography, life stages
or some sort of intent, such as people who have searched for info on a
new phone purchase. These analytics tools help marketers buy a
specific audience, not an audience implied by the context of a
specific site. (If I am looking to reach an "auto intender," I
advertise to them wherever they are online -- not just on auto sites.)
THERE'S A SCIENCE TO IT: AudienceScience bills itself as the largest
and most trusted audience aggregator in the world.
AUDIENCE MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS (AMPS): One of the rising terms of 2011.
The folks who provide the audience targeting now have platforms to
automate the process of buying audience-targeted inventory. Since many
of them also operate ad networks, it's a natural extension. Jeff
Hirsch, CEO of Audience Science, which has rebranded as an AMP, said
"AMP is the acronym representing a company that has DMP and DSP
capabilities."
BEACONS: A 1-by-1-pixel tag typically used by an advertiser or a
third-party ad server to track a unique user's activity over time. A
beacon helps to properly attribute an online action to ad exposure,
even if the action happened days after being exposed to the ad.
DoubleClick, which originated the concept, still uses the name
"spotlight tags."
BEHAVIORAL TARGETING: A now old-fashioned term that has been rebranded
as "audience targeting."
BETTER ADVERTISING (now Evidon): The folks bringing you the
Advertising Option Icon.
BLINDING: The practice of not designating where the inventory will be
placed. Exchanges or third-party networks will often "blind" an ad at
the publisher's request. Publishers do not want to create "channel
conflict" -- or a situation where someone besides their sales staff is
selling their inventory. (Never let your customer know someone else
sells the same thing cheaper.)
BLUNT TOOLS: Term referring to a broad-based "spray and pray"
approach, when a campaign doesn't use the available data to target
offers to specific interests of consumers. Amazon and Netflix are the
antithesis of blunt: they use their data to make buying
recommendations based on past purchase behavior that hopefully results
in higher conversions.
CLOUD COMPUTING: The technology that makes all this data connection
and movement work. Many ad exchanges run on a computing cloud created
by AppNexus which operates as an exchange of exchanges.
CLUTTER: Your typical web page, loaded with ads.
CONTEXTUAL TARGETING: There are two kinds -- natural context, where
you place a bank ad on a finance page, and contextual advertising,
which scans the text of a website for keywords and targets
advertisements based on those keywords, such as ads in Gmail that pop
up based on your email content.
COOKIES: There are several kinds.
First-party cookies: What your bank and Netflix use to know it's you
when you come to their sites.
Third-party cookies: What an ad server drops on your browser to
designate that you have shown interest in various product categories
or to place you in a demographic group discerned from your online
activity. These cookies can be used to target advertising.
Flash Cookies: Almost universally publicly derided in the industry
because they're difficult to get off your computer (but sometimes used
for the same reason). To delete them you have to go to Adobe's website
or manually do it through the Flash player setting on each site you
access.
Fresh cookies: Depending on the product category, fresher pieces of
data are better. For example, if I'm in market to buy a cellphone, I
may only shop around for a week or two -- so cookies dropped on me
during the past week or two are more likely to be reliable.
Cookie deletion: People concerned with privacy regularly use their
browsers to "dump their cache" of cookies. If you do it, be careful to
just dump the third-party ones or you will have to reenter your
information at places where you have registered. Cookies also dictate
frequency caps -- if you dump regularly, you are more likely to see
the same ads over and over and over again because the ad server won't
know you've already seen it many times.
CREATIVE OPTIMIZATION: Software systems that enable an advertiser to
default to the highest-performing creative or manage the frequency of
exposure, typically on a direct-response basis.
CPC (COST PER CLICK): All the amorphous branding talk aside,
cost-per-click -- a division of a campaign's cost by the number of ad
clicks it generated -- is still the reality for much online
direct-response buying reality.
DAA (DIGITAL ADVERTISING ALLIANCE): The alliance of a bunch of
acronymous trade orgs pushing for self-regulation: The 4A's, the
American Advertising Federation, Association of National Advertisers,
the Direct Marketing Association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau,
the Network Advertising Initiative and the Council of Better Business
Bureaus. The alliance represents more than 5,000 companies in the
space.
DATA AGGREGATORS: They pull together ad-serving data, conversion data
and third-party data, including those from offline sources (stripped
of personally identifiable info like names and addresses) like Acxiom,
Polk and Experian, to attach as many attributes as possible to online
cookies to refine targeting capabilities.
DMPS (DATA MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS): The hot term of 2011. These
self-service "dashboard" tools perform a range of services from
collecting, managing, segmenting, sharing and analyzing marketers'
advertising data -- and assuring that your data is your data.
DSP (DEMAND SIDE PLATFORM): Last year's hottest term. A computer-based
platform the buy-side (agencies and advertisers) uses to automate
media buying across multiple sources with unified targeting, data,
optimization and reporting. Data is treated like media in that it is
layered across the buy and becomes just another part of the cost. DSPs
do not own, purchase, represent or resell inventory from publishers.
As John Montgomery, chief operating officer of mOne puts it: "A DSP is
simply the plumbing that plugs into real-time inventory sources, such
as real-time exchanges, and participates in a public auction on behalf
of its clients." In contrast, ad networks own or represent inventory
from or on behalf of publishers.
DO NOT TRACK: Do not call killed telemarketing, and so the online
world fears what will happen if Washington institutes do-not-track
online privacy legislation. If there were one simple place where
consumers could opt out of any ad tracking, would they do it? Do they
understand what the implications are for their favorite sites?
ECPM: Effective CPM. Today, most buys are a mix of cost-per-thousand
impressions (CPM) and CPC. The eCPM answers the question: If I buy a
CPC campaign, what would I have paid if I bought it on a cost per
thousand (CPM basis)? It's used to compare whether a CPM or CPC buy
was actually more cost effective. To calculate: Campaign
cost/(impressions delivered/1000).
ENGAGEMENT RATES: What percent of total impressions for an ad were
hovered on, clicked or somehow interacted with? Usually applies to a
rich-media ad. Smart advertisers are taking it to the next step and
asking questions about what impact a "hover" has on ROI or an actual
sale.
EVIDON: (formerly BAA, Better Advertising Project) Selected by the DAA
to operate the advertising option icon self-regulatory program.
FREQUENCY CAPPING: Using cookies to manage the number of times a user
sees a specific ad creative. (Has never been done for most insurance,
teeth whitening or belly-fat ads.)
Noah Berger/Bloomberg
Randall Rothenberg
IAB: Industry trade group that has developed online ad standards and
guidelines, championed the cause of online publishers and the right to
target ads. Run by the respected and forthright Randall Rothenberg.
IMPRESSION: The act of someone seeing an online ad upon calling up a
web page. There is an approved and very technical definition of the
term, which has taken years of negotiation by the IAB. It's available
at iab.net.
INVENTORY: Common term for available ad impressions. For some reason,
the web world likes to talk as if it is moving units of underwear or
canned goods rather than pixels. Various types include:
Content farm: Inventory created because it's highly desirable to
advertisers and souped up through SEO so that people find it. Often
offers context, but can be marginal context.
Direct sold: Inventory bought directly from the publisher, typically
higher-quality stuff.
Contextual: Inventory that relates to a category of content or
advertising. Business pages on The New York Times are contextual
inventory for finance.
Premium/first-tier: As good as it gets, often contextual or highly
trafficked areas such as home pages and lead section pages.
Mid-tier: Inventory from a known site with decent content, but not a
top 100 site as ranked by ComScore.
Long tail: The vast inventory available from small, no-name sites and
blogs. There could be some valuable stuff in there that people really
look at -- or not. The challenge is segmenting it.
Remnant: Every large publisher's got unsold inventory, either simply
because you can't sell it or because of its context. Often gets thrown
into an exchange, where data is appended to turn it into an audience
buy.
OBA: Online behavioral advertising and also a compliance program led
by the IAB that sets standards for data usage in behavioral targeting.
ONE-BY-ONE (1X1) PIXEL TAGGING: What an ad trafficker needs to "drop"
on an ad (a pixel tag is an invisible image, basically) in order to
analyze a view through.
RTB (REAL-TIME BIDDING): The process of buying and selling impressions
instantaneously in which the highest bidder "wins" the right to place
a display ad while audience attributes are affixed to it. It was the
hot thing of 2010 but now that just about all the exchanges can do it,
they're on to the next acronym.
RETARGETING: An example: Say I shop for a car by looking at a couple
of auto sites. Those sites and third-parties drop cookies on me and
the computers and data management companies go into a fury trying to
find me on other sites as I surf the web, serving me auto ads until I
buy. Works brilliantly, but drives the privacy advocates nuts. I,
however, like it when I don't make an online clothing purchase due to
the price and the retailer "comes after me" and gives me a great offer
via an ad on another site. Thanks retargeted ad, you just closed the
deal!
SEMANTIC TARGETING: Targeting in which a computer system examines all
the words on a web page to identify the context of the page, rather
than relying on simple words or phrases. Simple contextual targeting
might see the word "golf" on the page. But semantic targeting can tell
you if it's an alligator-bites-man-in-Florida-on-golf-course story --
something Calloway wants no part of.
SENTIMENT ANALYSIS: Can also be used to determine if the "sentiment"
of the page is positive or negative, using that finding to possibly
suppress an ad (i.e., could help Calloway avoid placing an ad next to
an article about how golf is a lousy sport for overweight white guys
in media).
SOCIAL TARGETING: Uses data to find those obsessive social networkers
who influence the "social graph."
SUPPLY-SIDE PLATFORMS: A DSP but from the publisher or content
producer's perspective.
TLA: Three Letter Acronym. It's what the online ad industry is
becoming, jokes Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai, a data aggregator and
now a DMP.
VIEW THROUGH: A look at the post-ad-impression behavior. If your "view
through" window is 30 days, a person's actions within 30 days of
seeing the ad can count toward the ad's effectiveness. For more, see
beacons.
VCS: The cash and promise of going public or getting bought by Google
or Facebook that fuels it all.
YIELD OPTIMIZATION: Employed by publishers to find out how much their
impressions are worth and how they can you manage flow of inventory to
make the most money? These platforms look at each impression available
on a web-publisher site and then match the impression with an
available ad from an ad network or exchanges.
