Smart Planning on the MediaMind platform centralizes your historic performance data, publisher proposals, budget parameters and historical costs into one interface and allows you to make smarter media buys at a lower cost; eliminating inefficiencies in the planning and buying process. This entertaining video outlines the pain points facing media planners and demonstrates how Smart Planning simplifies and contributes to the planning process.

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I have been busy over the last few months meeting with different agencies and their media teams, speaking with them about their planning and buying process and needs. The main problem that I kept hearing about over and over again was the workflow inefficiency and overhead that goes with the planning and buying premium media buys. I was quite surprised by that. Well, to be more precise, I was surprised to hear only about this issue.


When you speak with the typical planner about her work while planning and negotiating her premium media buys, you definitely realize how heavy and inefficient the process is and how it leads to sub-optimal media plans and campaign results. But there’s also another problem, a subtle problem that might have even a larger negative impact on the media plan and campaign results. I am specifically referring to the lack of available data to support the planner’s decision making.

 When you ask the average planner which data she uses for planning media buys and negotiating rates, you realize how little data is available for the planner and how much it’s dependent on intuition. Here’s a classic example. One of the tasks that a media planner needs to complete is developing a consideration set – a list of the best sites and networks to be considered for the campaign. In most cases, this task pretty much ends up in pulling few reports from research tools like ComScore, Nielsen or Quantcast as well as reusing sites from previous campaigns. So, what’s the problem with that? These research tools can definitely tell the planner which sites are most relevant for the campaign’s target audience, but they can’t tell her how these sites are going to perform. Sure, the planner can pull some data from the last campaign – but is this enough to make a calculated decision? So the planner ends up making an important decision with a huge impact on the bottom line while seeing only a small portion of the big picture. Not good.

 An even more problematic example is the way negotiations are conducted. Ask the typical media planner what was the average price she paid for a certain site, section or a placement over the past few campaigns or year and you’ll get a puzzled look. Don’t even bother asking her if she knows how much her colleagues have paid for the same media buy in the past – there’s no chance you’ll get an answer. So does the planner have any chance to effectively negotiate anything without historical data or any sort of baseline? Not really. The planner ends up negotiating blindly. Very bad.

Can you see how absurd it is? Here’s a highly innovative and data driven space that offers advanced algorithms to manage real time bidding (buying) and laser-like targeting that matches the right message to the right person, but at its core decisions are still made based on… gut feeling, intuition and who knows what else…


All of this is not really the planners’ fault. Planners need access to the relevant historical data and the appropriate tools to properly plan media buys – sites’ historical performance and engagement data to forecast site’s performance and pricing data to effectively negotiate rates.


So, what I’m  really trying to say is that it’s time we start answering the data needs for planning and negotiating premium media buys in addition to improving their workflow. Data is not only important for audience network buys or exchange buys. It is highly important for premium campaigns as well. At the end of the day, most of the online media spend still goes to premium media and will remain so in the near future.




Ronnie Lavi | Senior Manager, Product Planning

“Change or die!” says the famous phrase which seems to describe the current trend in the online display advertising space these days. The space has been going through a radical change in the past few years with the emergence of indirect media buying channels (e.g. exchanges such as RightMedia, DoubleClick Ad Exchange), real time bidding platforms (e.g. Turn, Invite Media, MediaMath, AppNexus) and new targeting technology. Speaking with different industry leaders, it’s fascinating to see how different people react to this change. A significant amount of people were quick to embrace and adapt (let’s call them “the adopters”), while many others still deny, ignore or even push back (and let’s call them “the resisters”).
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In my view, the resisters’ reactions are normal in times of change – some are the result of the natural human tendency to fight changes, others are just a mean to handle the risk and insecurity caused by this disruption. If you are a resister, then let me console you with some good news. As much as the industry believes that the exchange and DSPs trend is going to increase the volume of indirect buys at the expense of direct buys, the majority of the media will still be bought in the traditional direct channels for at least a few years. The current assessments range around a 70:30 split (direct:indirect) over the next 3 years.

Feeling good? Great, but I‘ve also got some bad news. Things need to change (and they WILL change) in the way that direct buys are planned and executed. The change that we’re going through happens for a reason and I think that there is an important lesson to learn here. Let’s face it; things haven’t scaled so well thus far. If we stop for a second and ask ourselves what is the industry problem that exchanges and DSPs aim to fix, then the answer is the inefficiency of buying media through direct channels and the suboptimal results of online display advertising so far (in the eyes of marketers).

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that online advertising doesn’t work. If anything, I think that marketers need to increase their digital marketing budgets. However, online advertising hasn’t met marketers’ expectations so far and we ought to change it if we want to keep our game on. Change to Thrive!

Going forward, buying media through direct channels should resemble more the experience of buying through indirect channels by allowing marketers (or actually their agencies) to buy better performing media at an optimal price and in an efficient manner. So, how do we get there? Through better technology. So far media buying decisions were mostly based on simple contextual considerations, short-term pricing info and generic audience data. Why? Because this is what was immediately available for media planners while the planning and buying process was highly labor intensive and didn’t allow them to think strategically. The planning and buying tools of the future should change that.

Until now, planning and buying tools were mostly focused on workflow improvements. That’s OK but in the future they need to evolve and include relevant data for better decision making. Data is the greatest asset of online advertising but it’s currently spread over multiple sources and in many cases it isn’t easily accessible. Plugging in relevant data (and relevant data only) in a meaningful way can solve that problem and allow media planners to step up their game and bring better campaign results. Obviously, workflow efficiency will still be an important aspect and should radically improve otherwise media planning and buying will continue to be inefficient and drive suboptimal results. And if that is going to be the case, then I can guarantee you that 3 years down the 70:30 forecasted split between direct and indirect media buying will be the other way around – 30:70.

So, one way or the other – change will happen and that change will be good!

“Change or Die!”

Huh, that’s it? “We need data (and improved workflow efficiency)” – that’s all I have to say? Well, not quite. If you want more concrete ideas then stay tuned for part 2.

Ronnie Lavi | Senior Manager, Product Planning

VAST 2.0 was finally released last month after few months of hard team work by the Digital Video Committee (DVC) at the IAB.

Although VAST 1.0 provided a solid ground for the industry to run in-stream ads in a consistent and scalable manner it wasn’t comprehensive enough to support the different business needs and possible campaign scenarios. In addition, VAST 1.0 wasn’t always clear from technical perspective as developers were sometimes confused regarding the proper implementation of the VAST.

Realizing the business needs and technical ambiguity, the DVC decided to release a new version of the VAST. Initially planned to be a short list of enhancements, VAST 2.0 ended up as a major upgrade with some significant (non backwards compatible) changes. It is always better to avoid significant, let alone non backwards compatible, changes when it comes to industry technology standards, however in this case it was inevitable. Had they not been handled, the issues with VAST 1.0 would have blocked further adoption of the VAST by publishers and technology vendors which would mean the end of the show for the IAB’s in-stream advertising standardization efforts.

Without getting into too many details – the main benefit with the VAST 2.0 is its ability to provide enough flexibility to support the future and current business needs of the industry while still providing a clear framework from a technical perspective. With the VAST 2.0 everyone should benefit – publishers that sell in-stream inventory, agencies that buy media and technology vendors that facilitate the business between publishers and agencies.

Here are two examples of the improvements in VAST 2.0:
1. Support for complex placements that go beyond the simple pre-roll. As the in-stream advertising space evolves, we should expect a growth in the demand for placements which consist of a combination of linear units (e.g. pre-rolls), non linear units (e.g. overlays) and companions units. These types of placements can be priced in multiple ways and the VAST 2.0 will be able to support the different pricing models.

2. Tracking specific creative elements – one of the most important things for agencies are tracking capabilities and these are especially crucial when it comes to complex in-stream placements. VAST 2.0 will allow tracking below the ad level and verify that each creative element (e.g. linear unit, non-linear unit) is properly served.

Serving as a member of the VAST work group, it was impressive to see a group of competitors coming together (again) and working hard hand in hand to solve mutual key problems. I witnessed the strong commitment of all the leading industry players to both the VAST and the in-stream advertising technology standardization in general. The industry definitely has lots of faith in the VAST (and VPAID) and there is good reason to believe that we are on the right (and fast) track to scale the in-stream advertising space.

Now that we have VAST 2.0 there are no more excuses. The industry must step forward and adopt the VAST (and VPAID) if we want to see more ad dollars spent by advertisers. I, for one, have already adopted it.

Ronnie Lavi | Senior Manager, Product Planning

In the past year, I have been busy preaching to advertisers and agencies to look at search and display as complementary channels and analyze their performance in a holistic manner (disclaimer: Eyeblaster offers a product called Channel Connect for Search designed to help agencies and advertisers in this type of holistic cross channel analysis). I have been pushing the mantra that display is an upper funnel channel, while search is a lower funnel channel and together they should complement and assist each other in driving conversions. Therefore, I have been saying that comparing the two channels is wrong and that the right approach is to analyze the entire path to conversion while focusing on the synergy created by using both channels together. Well, I still strongly stand behind my mantra but recently I have seen several cases where path to conversion and cross channel synergy analysis was not feasible since there was no overlap between search and display (i.e. only few users were exposed to both display ads and search ads). The main reason for the low overlap was poor cross channel planning and execution prior to the campaign launch, which led to lack of synchronization between the search and display campaigns. This made me realize that in my recommendations I did not emphasize enough the critical phase of the campaign pre-launch. The pre-launch phase, which includes planning and execution, is the underlying basis for successful analysis at the end of the campaign (or at any other stage) and therefore it is critical to apply the holistic approach during this stage as well. But what does this actually mean?


Here’s a list of best practices that I recommend for holistic cross channel campaign planning and execution:


1. Campaign objectives synch – to drive the desired results, the search and display campaigns must share the same objective. Whether it is selling a product, building brand awareness or simply driving traffic to the site, it is critical that both search and display campaigns share the exact same objective. This is the single most import aspect of the synchronization between search and display.


2. Target audience synch – this goes without saying. The same audience should be targeted across search and display and that requires synching display targeting tactics with keyword bidding strategy. For example, if you target your display ads to a specific geographic area (e.g. a new compact car geo-targeted to NYC and SF metros) then make sure that you bid on search keywords which include relevant geo terms (e.g. name of car + “NYC” or “SF”).


3. Creative synch – it is critical to make sure that the creative messages are synched across search and display to communicate a cohesive message throughout the consumer’s path which will lead to a conversion at the end of it. For example, if the display creative highlights a certain feature in your product, make sure that you bid on the relevant search keywords for this feature and that the search ad copy will highlight the same product feature.


4. Campaign set up synch – from an execution perspective it is critical to properly synch the landing pages and conversion tags across the search and display campaigns. The display and search campaigns should use the same landing pages and conversion tags to allow tracking the entire path to conversion and de-duplication of conversions between search and display.


5. Campaign periods synch – finally, it is important to properly plan the search and display campaigns launch and end dates. This is particularly critical in cases when the conversion/purchase funnel is short so the search and display campaigns should overlap in their start and end date. In these cases, if one of the campaigns launches too late, there will be missed opportunities to drive consumers to conversion.


This is it for a start. I am sure that as you dive into the small details of the campaign planning and execution, you will find some additional best practices. If you have any, then please feel free to share.


 

Ronnie Lavi | Manager, Product Planning and Business Development