So what are the big issues we face moving forward in digital ... and all media? Well, we've asked six respected industry people to give us their opinion.
Week 2 we have Monique Talbot from Tempest.
Tempest Media is one of Australia's leading Ad Networks - representing the likes of carsales, AOL, the Glam Media network and Ticketek. They also have the eDM network, Zoom Direct and played a pivotal role in establishing the likes of ebay and YouTube within the display advertising market.
So what are Monique's 5 things to look out for ...
1) Branding Vs Performance
Branding Campaigns online - Does such a thing exist? Many agencies talk about wanting to do Online Branding campaigns but then when the results of the campaign come back to them they say - 'oh it didn't back out to an efficient ROI for the client'. What is wrong with sharing the expected outcome with us the publishers from the beginning so we can all work to the same end goal - a happy client and a happy agency?
2) Performance Campaigns
Great when tracked properly. Great to see that some of our major publishers are seeing performance campaigns as a positive way to monitise 100% of their inventory without jeopodising or even worse cannibilsing their high value CPM camapigns. It is becoming more and more evident to us that Performance campaigns only work well for the publisher and the advertiser when they are run with intelligent technology platforms like Adconion or something like PPlus from Ninemsn. I think we all learnt the hard way in 2007 how not to run performance campaigns effectively from a standard ad platform like Dart for Publishers etc even with human intervention. The technology must have the smarts to evaluate the commercials of a campaign and make them compete against one another for the best result for the advertiser and the publisher and this cannot be done effectively manually.
3) First cookie recognition
Something we should all be concerned about right now. The display/performance dollars flowing through our industry are growing at a rapid pace but we need to be mindful that everyone is apportioning credit where credit is due. Should it be last view, first view? Perhaps all cookies should be dropped off the click so that only publishers that cause an action are advantaged? One thing is for sure we need to be consistent in our approach and there does need to be some degree of fair play.
4) Portals transforming themselves into Ad Networks
What is an ad network these days? I know for a fact that Tempest is referred to as an ad network but we don't sell our sites on a network wide basis - does this still make us an ad network? Our premium content sites are all sold on an exclusive site specific basis and Tempest does not own any of the sites in our network therefore preventing any confict of interest for us yet we do have the largest network of independent sites in Australia. Amazingly to me, the portals on the other hand seem to think that a smart growth strategy is suddenly getting into the ad network game. How will they provide value to publishers when they will most certainly push money to their own sites first and then the sites in their ad network second?
5) Email resurgance
With the growth in performance we have seen email marketing come into its own again. Our Zoom Direct database with over 250,000 Aussies has been steadily growing with the amount of advertisers wanting to send offers to it's willing audience. The difference now is that now many of these deals are CPC or the even more popular CPL. Market researchers seem to have finally been bitten by the digital bug too and they want to use the online medium to ask for user feedback in their own time rather than those annoying phone calls. We love market researchers because they operate with a high degree of discipline and are willing to pay a fair price for the right response.
Tempest Media - http://www.tempestmedia.com/
Tempest Blog - http://tempestmedia.typepad.com/tempestvoice/
Next week: Tony Faure, CEO ninemsn
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2 comments:
Hi Monique - I think this is an excellent overview.
As a publisher of several websites (theroar.com.au and lostateminor.com) I'd like to add a few themes I'm seeing in this space.
The first is better monetisation options for middle and long-tail sites reaching Australian audiences. In the US there's networks such as Federated Media, The Deck and dozens of other (increasingly niched) ad networks for smaller sites. In Australia, there's a paucity of options (though I'm trialling COGS right now - which is aiming to hit this space). So unless you reach 100k + UVs and can engage you guys at Tempest or hire a sales rep, it's a tough fight for ad dollars in Oz. This needs to change in order for the dominance of the big portals to shift to with consumer's browsing habits.
The second element I see is the lack of options around monetizing international traffic. Apparently 50% of the SMH's traffic is coming from overseas; and they stuggle with monetizing this outside of Google AdSense. We have this with Lost At E Minor, as our content isn't geographically focused.
How long will it be before the big advertisers start putting some money into international marketing spend; rather than tie it 100% to single geographies. It's the irony of the web that the traffic is global and unbounded, but the business is still so geared around small geographies and local budgets.
Zac Zavos - Conversant Media
www.theroar.com.au - Your Sports Opinion
www.lostateminor.com - Pop Culture
Hey Zac,
Great post and really enjoying your comments!
In regards to your question re intl marketing spend ... I think for some brands this might happen sooner rather than later. We work with a few larger global brands at MS and some are already investigating this type of thing.
Some brands already do this - however it's generally only a bit part of a geographically exclusive campaign. I know this happens with some movie houses.
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