Stephen Tompkins' Ideas

Tag Much?

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:53:00 -0800

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

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Never let me marry this!

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:46:41 -0800

Please :)

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Does this come in wallet-size?

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:49:00 -0800

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!

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GMail has display!

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 08:28:00 -0800

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.

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2 awesome things

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 18:50:58 -0800

Steve McQueen and Miami Heat

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Don't Miss Your Shot...

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:36:20 -0800

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.

The moderator then posed the question to the audience after a few answers he decided to pose the question to the two agency folks in the audience. My colleage being not wanting to answer quickly dropped the microphone in my lap. My answer was short but I think it was poignant and after a couple of months it still holds true. I simply said, "if you wish to build better pipes and make a more efficient marketplace we are all for it. My concern lies in inventory quality and the ability to drive better performance for my clients."

Not a surprising answer considering my background in design and my position at an agency. The surprising thing was what is implied within the answer and how many folks simply still do not understand the major factors determining campaign success.

Those indicators to me are the following:

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.
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!

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All hair and no face people...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 23:18:46 -0800

See the full gallery on Posterous

Or is it the death star?

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Where MacBooks go to die :)

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 14:40:57 -0800

It's been awhile since I posted but I got a new MacBook Pro and found all these old ones. Any ideas on what I should do with them?

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My most famous retweet

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 20:11:18 -0700

Miami Heat star Mike Miller retweeted me yesterday. This is awesome and reminds me of the unprecedented access we have to pro athletes today. It must be tough for these guys considering all the avenues to screw up. Anyway - thanks Mike and Go Heat!!!

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Me in 4 squares

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 07:41:49 -0700

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Welcome the Freedom Tower to NYC skyline.

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:47:52 -0700

Here is a pic and off in the distance is the Freedom Tower. Welcome to the skyline!!!!

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Wow

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 17:50:47 -0700

I got out of this taxi a mere 1 block before he got in an accident! Someone upstairs is looking out for me.

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New Job - time for a change...

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:47:39 -0700

So, I have not posted in awhile and some major things have changed.

1. I have moved onto work at VivaKi on the AOD product. 2 months in and it rocks! Innovative product and great folks!

2. I decided due to my inability to post material related to my display knowledge (aka sheer laziness) I would personalize this blog a bit more. I'll still add tech stuff now and again but look for more of my unique life in NY :)

For now, I am off to play basketball so here is a picture of my new work door.

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Coach Spolestra and Data Driven Results

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 11:27:55 -0800

I just read a great article on ESPN.com about the data driven approach that Coach Spolestra (of my beloved Miami Heat) took in the off season to prepare for two of the best perimeter scoring players of the decade. In a nut shell, it says he analyzed charts showing where Wade and James felt most comfortable shooting from the field. The data showed that both loved the high pick and roll. The only problem is that two players running the high pick and roll doesn't work because one needs to pass to the other to score. Alas, with two players who like to play the same way, what do you do to get internal buy in for changing the fundamental nature of their games? You use data to prove that trading off your comfort zone (high pick and rolls) with some varied plays will result in a better overall performance which translates into more wins.

Reading this article immediately reminded me of my data-driven business. Many times we use data from various sources to make decisions based on real time interactions. In other words, looking at a placements performance from multiple views during a campaign allows us to better optimize its performance based on interactions through the life of the run. This is not a ground breaking revelation in itself but I started to think about the second part of the article.

What if you were to sacrifice a placements sweet spot to help the overall performance of a buy? How would this look? Would you use creative in conjunction with placement to determine optimal run time? Or would you use something more complex and multi-faceted like time of day/creative/placement on page and color to determine its success? I would think the more complex you drove the space the better your results would become.

Coming from a graphic design background, I am a big proponent of creative being the main factor toward someone's propensity to click and subsequently purchase. With this in mind, I am starting to think more in terms of creative becoming more than just a pretty ad. Creative, like a placement, has its own ecosystem (color, text, graphic) all of which play into a users taste and need to be added to the data driven decisions that are made on strategy.

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Demand Side Platforms and Lebron James - Twice the Hype

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 13:01:03 -0800

As my beloved Miami Heat hit their stride and continue to blow out opponents and perform as one of the best basketball teams in the NBA it makes you wonder about all the hype this summer. Does it match the play on the court?

Much like the NBA, online media is filled with hype. What will the over-hyped technology of 2011 be DSP maybe SSP? I am not sure which one it will be but one thing is for sure. The media will find its darling very soon and latch onto her much like the sports media did with Lebron James and "The Decision" this summer.

That is not the only parallel one can see with Lebron James and Demand Side Platforms. Way back in 2005 when Lebron was in high school he was hyped as the next Jordan. The savior of basketball before he even stepped foot on an NBA court. In fact, his mother was granted a loan on the potential he possessed. Does that remind anyone of venture funding for DSP? It seems one only needs the acronym in their company byline to secure some money for development!

I am certainly not saying that Demand Side Platforms are unwelcome in the industry. Quite the opposite, I am a big fan of their potential to lead display advertising to the next level. (much like Lebron did for the NBA) I am just wary of the hype many folks in the industry who call themselves DSP's are generating and if the self-labeling merits the hype.

The way I see it: Demand Side Platform's are going to be Lebron James or Pervis Ellison in 2011. The key will be finding one that backs up the hype with solid performance and a great all-around game :)

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I {heart} my BFA

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:22:00 -0700

When I was younger I worried about the implications of having a Bachelors of Fine Arts degree versus a Bachelor of Science. Would I be pigeoned-holed into being a designer all my life? Were countless beatings at the hands of mindless Account Exec's to become par for the course? As strange as those worries seem now, they were grounded in the reality of my situation. Partly a combination of time and location, my vision was impeded by colleagues, friends and bosses. I have been in New York for six years now and have grown beyond even my own ideas. Mostly thanks to my BFA because without it I would have not been able to continuously assess, adapt and adopt to every situation.

Assess - In art school, we learned to begin all our projects by using your artistic sensibility to assess the overall picture and begin to visualize different solutions both process and creative oriented. By taking a creative top-level strategic look at our problems we began to form a different type of process. In sharp contrast to regular schools where you learn to only focus on one solution to most problems we learned solutions are only limited by the mind's capacity to develop them.
Adapt - Being made to constantly switch applications and learn new technologies at a sometimes dizzying pace was perfect primer for the internet age. HTML, drawing and reading formed the backbone of studies and we constantly were sharpening our abilities to adapt. I have met many MBA's stuck on process and unable to see big picture changes coming.
Adopt - Sometimes in the name of good design and other times not so good design, we were experimenting with new technologies and adopting it as part of our visual solutions. Being early adopters then made it easier to learn to fit technology to solution instead of solution to technology.

In the current economy, value is placed on creativity, problem-solving and being able to set oneself apart from a crowded field of potential. My BFA has armed me with all the tools to do this and more. I am almost ten years out of school now and can finally say that I made the right choice pursuing my degree in Visual Communications.

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The Great Creative Divide

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:15:18 -0700

Online design was once a land of rich creative concepts overflowing with ingenuity and thoughtful attention to design elements. Astute online surfers needed to look no further than nearest website to see great creative in action. Now you have to surf far and wide to find terrific creative because mostly what you find is utilitarian ads built by machines trying to predict patterns based off a cookie.

This machine-driven creative that permeates every corner of the web is a major contributor and in direct relation to the downward pressure on click-through rates. Here are a couple of reasons why:

As the lines between Search and Display increasingly blur it comes at the cost of great creative. Why do I say this? Search ads are utilitarian in look. A certain number of lines, characters and colors are the ad. There is not much room to deviate. But most people forget that display ads sit in the beginning of the sales cycle. The exploratory phase where folks are weighing options and making decisions about what they desire so you see why creative execution becomes an essential component. Search sits at the other spectrum its much less used for decision driving than executing on a well researched idea. What does this mean? It means that creative concepts are much less removed than they should be for display ads because the look is uniform. Making creative decisions based on data can only get you so far.

In the race to become more relevant we have actually become less relevant. I know that sounds confusing but think about it for a second. We respond to things that are emotional and stir up a certain emotion inside of us. (Funny ads make us laugh) Machine driven creative is just that, driven by a machine and devoid of emotion. Have you ever felt any compassion for your alarm clock when its batteries die? No, because its devoid of feeling just like these types of ads.

The main purpose of pure creative is to catch the eye. Much of this dynamic stuff is made to be versatile and fit many formats and languages. Often this tends to be at the expense of truly great eye-catching creative. (You can't fit a square peg in a round hole unless you make the hole big enough to catch all) This catch-all creative is often overlooked as too utilitarian and not enough of a differentiator.

Of course, I realize that decisions based on data are the wave of the future and I believe in them. I just think that a uniform application of data as driving force to various mediums will only lead to more confusion. A confusion that could eventually stunt the growth of online ads as marketers scramble to undue the past.

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Changing Emails

Tue, 11 May 2010 13:20:59 -0700

Lately, I have put quite a bit of thought into changing my email. I have used my old email for quite sometime now and it performs sufficiently. I have my filters and folders set just like I want them to properly sort my email. But the actual email name reminds me of a different time and place. You see its tied to my old blog and houses a brand I associated with that blog and thus Stephen 1.0. As myopic as this seems, I really have felt that I would like to change to a more "grown up" email that is representative of my new blog and self. And with all maturation processes there are significant growing pains along the way.

First and foremost is getting everyone of my subscriptions/friends/logins linked to my new email. Subscriptions and logins are relatively easy as I can migrate them as they are received. Then they are set for life or until I change them again.

Friends are a different story. They will use the old email and complain about changing their address books. I must admit its quite the dilemma and I continue to waver back and forth about what I should do. I did realize that with GMail that I can set my filters to forward all the emails from my old email to my new account and therefore not miss any emails sent in error from an old friend or company. This seems to be a pretty decent solution but I was curious if anyone else had any other ideas on migrating accounts.

I would love to hear anyone else's thoughts on this particularly messy situation.

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Twitter Ads

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 07:26:47 -0700

Everyone seems to be talking about Twitter's new ad model this week. The newly unveiled promoted tweets in search results ad model was shown by Twitter's CFO this week and clearly is a big step forward for the company. While, I have looked at it and I have not formulated a set in stone opinion on whether it will work or not but I do think it is only a small step towards fully monetizing the website.

Why do I say this?

First, the ads are only going to be displayed on a tiny fraction of the site, being seen by users who search via the web interface only. Twitter has not disclosed numbers on how many folks search but I have to figure its a tiny fraction and when you ad that small number by the number of users who generally click on ads you get an even smaller number. Do you see where I am headed with this?

Second, Google was successful by matching desire with satisfaction. Meaning that people desired to find stuff on the web and Google provided satisfactory results to those queries.

Folks don't go on Twitter to search. Their main intent is for quick snippets of information without searching or spending alot of time finding it. I would venture to say that the average Twitter user finds his connections through friends and via other means than searching on the UI.

Let's hope these ads are relevant when landing in the results page and its not at the expense of the experience that these ads take precedence over other more relevant results. In any event, its nice to see Twitter has started to monetize the site and we can only hope that it will not interrupt the experience too much.

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3 Common Implementation Errors

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 13:57:00 -0700

Digital marketing has ushered in a new wave of analytical marketing where everything can be measured right down to the click. But unfortunately its is not without its faults and the issues come in all different shapes and sizes. Everything from complex coding to simple human error is common place. And in my role at Microsoft Advertising, I see a wide variety of these issues ranging from the mundane to the utterly complex.

One of the most common errors I see that leads to more client headaches than any is publisher implementation. These varied errors cause more wasted time than any other type of error when investigating differences between publisher and client. The good news is they almost always can be prevented by a little thought and preparation before hand.

Here are a few simple and easy rules to make sure your tag is implemented correctly.

First make sure the tag is placed on the page. Its quite common for publisher to implement the tags on the wrong page or just not at all. So look to see if the ad is running and on the right page. It seems like a no-brainer but you would be surprised how often this is the case.
Second, make sure the entire tag is implemented from beginning to end on the page and not broken. The method for QA-ing in this manner depends on the type of tag but generally you want to spot the opening tag which will look something like this: < iframe > or
Finally, make sure cache busters are implemented. Many times its the case that browsers are caching an older version of the tag and not counting all the impressions. To QA this simply look for the cache buster in the string. Different systems have different versions of cache buster so make sure the tag you look at has the appropriate buster on it.

This is certainly not all the possible implementation issues I have come across in my time. However, I would say it accounts for the bulk of them. Not to mention, its always a terrific idea to QA these first and foremost as you can almost always save yourself some time on the back-end when your reporting shows up with gaps. Hopefully this provides a good starting point for publishers and advertisers alike and happy implementing!

*** This is a repost from stemato.com my original blog.

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