Publishers Be Warned: Audience buying is the new dominant trend in online advertising

By now the message should be clear to all publishers; advertisers are not going to continue to pay high CPMs without appropriate, measurable ROI. The days when a website could demand high CPM rates for their content are long gone, even the so called "premium" sites aren't immune to this phenomenon. Any site who still believes that a marketer will spend premium dollar for a placement on their "premium" site without measurable return is nuts. Direct marketers don't care where a customer came from...

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How can you use advance advertising reports?

Advance Reports Are For Losers. Yes, I said it, advance reports are for losers. Those advertisers who are obsessed with acquiring or building advance media or performance reports either have no clue what they're doing or are just giving in to the latest hype. Technology providers continue to roll out new advance reports as additional dimensions of competition, features that will distinguish them from other technology providers, though these reports provide little if any true incremental value to...

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Ad/message relevance is the most important element in online advertising

Advertising is about relevance, period. The more relevant your ad is to the consumer the more impactful it will be and the greater your aggregate return. No amount of creative genius, cutting edge ad format, or dynamic interaction can save an ad campaign from poor relevance. Search marketing, a $15 billion business in the US which dwarfs display's $8 billion, is completely based on relevance. When a user searches for something online they are both interested in the product or service and are currently...

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Cable Tries to Save Itself

Many of you may already know that I believe cable television companies are heading to the slaughter house.  The number of entertainment and video distribution substitutes that are popping up on an almost monthly basis is hard to keep up with. There are many other reasons why I think their business is in trouble, but I wouldn't dive into those right now. While doing my nightly industry reading I came across an interesting article in the economist that talks about Time Warner's plans to save...

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Search & Display, Married Forever

This month iProspect, a search marketing company, released a study about how display campaigns and search campaigns are integrated. The study highlighted, among other things, the need to include a solid search campaign with any online media effort. Not a very surprising conclusion considering that iProspect makes money from managing search campaigns, but the study did put numbers around what many of us in the industry have known all along. That is, running a display campaign without a fully integrated...

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The Problem With Big Media

If you've read enough of my posts you would know that I am not necessarily a fan of the big media establishments. Call me a nonconformist if you like, but I do have my reasons. My biggest beef with the media titans is the constant use of their position to push their own social and political agendas. Today I have a nice shinny example to show you. Earlier this week the Amazon Kindle DX was revealed to the world and hailed as a revolution in media distribution which could potentially save the dying...

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