Come on Miami Herald - its no wonder it takes 10 years for your site to load if it ever does load fully...

So, I just found this video when I was digging up some stuff about the online video advertising market. I really wish I could have this in a wallet size so everytime someone asked me that age old question, "what do you do?" I could just bust out this bad boy. 

Its super simple and not terribly informative to me but I think the average person would suffice it as an answer to what I do!

So, I finally signed out of my GMail today and spotted this huge banner ad at the bottom of the login. Interesting to see this huge banner with no other ads surrounding it. It reminds me of he early days of display ads when pages were less filled with ads. 

A couple months back, I attended a OpenRTB meeting at the NASDAQ. My colleague and I were the only brave agency folks to speak up at the event. (against my wishes and better judgement) In any event, a few of the major demand side platforms were there and talking about establishing a standard for RTB and if it would lead to more brand dollars being place online.

1. Relevance
   • Time - We all know the importance of hitting the right user at the right time. In the addressable marketplace we employ data partners to hit the right cookie in a place the right place. I do wonder alot about data and its usefulness though. How much performance are these campaigns actually driving? Are the CTR's enough to actually justify the spend? The answers to these questions I believe lies in the numbers and perhaps a new metric eDCPM or effective data cost per millie. How many campaigns actually back out the math and see what an effective spend to incremental CTR curve would look like? My thoughts are we would find that day part targeting or some other free tactic would work just as well. In the end, I guess I still struggle with the actual value of data like many folks.
2. Quality
   • Place - Place ties into quality because you bad placement = bad quality. Many of the people laying out publisher websites approach their sites with a mind set of monetization first and UX second. I hope one day that we will see a fundamental shift of web development that places monetization second to UX. This strategy has led to a oversupply of inventory on a level that is hard to understand. All these ads placed on a site with no thought to the actual person's feelings has led to "banner blindness" which in turn has led to an overall dilution of quality. 
   • Creative - Creative is a indicator that is near to my heart. I started my career as a designer and have seen a robotization of creative only lead to watered down campaigns. It also has only helped to precipitate the consumers ability to tune out ads they find to be made by machine and lacking of passion. Developing creative with a sense of design that would engage users and draw them in would again drive user engagement and in turn better performance. 

These indicators certainly do not live in a box and all interact with each other to form what is a visceral experience with online ads. For example, inventory has a relationship with timing that creates a paradigm of perfection to ultimately end in a conversion. So, next time you create or strategize a campaign keep these in mind and you will ultimately drive better performance from the start!