Adify IS IAB Ad Measurement Audited and Certified by IM Services Group

Last week, Adify was proud to announce that we achieved IAB Ad Measurement Auditing and Certification. This audit and certification were completed by IM Services Group, an auditor listed on the IAB web site. The IAB does not certify or audit any company, but does accept certification letters from third party auditors confirming that a company complies with the IAB's Ad Measurement Guideline. Our announcement was covered by MediaPost . This morning, MediaPost wrote a correction with the headline Adify Not IAB Certified. IAB’s own web site refutes that claim.


The ensuring article focused on who performed the actual audit – and anyone familiar with the process would know it MUST be a third party, approved auditor as the IAB does not do audits. Adify stands by our release.


IAB Ad Measurement Auditing and Certification entails a third party auditor verifying the technology and processes of the advertising provider and ensuring that the ad measurements are reliable and accurate. Just as the Oscars are calculated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, IAB Ad Measurement Auditing and Certification is performed by third party auditors. Adify used IM Services. Every one of the fourteen companies who have completed this process used a third party auditor and everyone of us can claim to have completed IAB Ad Measurement Auditing and Certification. Adify is proud to be one of them.

Piggyback on Superbowl Ads

If you are like me, you were probably watching the Superbowl this past Sunday, trying to pay attention to the ads amid the actual excitement of the game. One week later, I have a hard time remembering and associating some of the brands with their commercials and with their products. I’m not the only one in this situation. Studies found that brand recall for many advertising participants in previous year’s game suffered quite a bit. It’s no surprise given the sensory overexposure associated with the event and the fact that the game itself was such a compelling distraction. There is no question that there is value in the nearly 100 million eyeballs this past Superbowl offered because of pure reach. Sometimes, it’s enough to be associated with the NFL and the Superbowl to make it worth your $2.7 million ad budget.


How does the 2008 marketer use online marketing to leverage the unique attention to advertising following the Superbowl? It all depends on where you stand in your Superbowl ad. Companies like GoDaddy, Pepsi and E*Trade are right in the thick of online campaigns right now. However, for anyone who competes with those companies and other Superbowl advertisers, there’s certainly an opportunity online to sway the attention of your customer away from the marketers with the bigger spend through a compelling message that reaches your audience on the niche sites that capture more and more of their attention.


Even if you couldn’t leverage a Superbowl ad for brand awareness among your target customers, you probably have opportunities to insert your brand into a void. Consumers may remember a GPS navigation commercial last Sunday – Garmin, if you need to know. Other GPS navigation companies should leverage the recall of the concept. Identify your audience (whether it be soccer moms, business travelers, etc.) and engage them on the various Superbowl-related sites out there, sites about sports and TV ads. Chances are, if there was any interest in your type of product to begin with, it wouldn’t matter whether you advertised in the Superbowl or not. You’re filling the customer’s void.


Alternatively, find your audience where they normally go outside of the Superbowl and sports sites. Sometimes, it’s not what the ad is, but where they find it. Automobile manufacturers have probably drummed up more interest in cars after the game. Even so, good luck running a campaign on car sites, as most of the major ones are sold out already. Instead, find the soccer moms on mom-oriented sites. Reach those 18-34-year old males on entertainment sites. Adjust the creative and try to capture some of the Superbowl spirit to remind them of what drove their interest – even if they don’t remember if they saw your TV ad. Companies pay a lot for engagement during the game. Marketers can have a more effective spend online, and increase engagement.


The Superbowl is an opportunity not just for the spenders in the game, but for all the companies in the category. The challenge is finding your customer and leveraging category recall to bring your message to the top. Consider it piggybacking on your competitors to reach the consumer directly. You wouldn’t use this on day-to-day campaigns, but big events tend to merit this approach. The Superbowl comes only once a year and is still significant in consumer's minds, so start piggybacking now.

Einstein and Online Advertising Measurement

"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." – Albert Einstein


Einstein kept that statement over his desk in his office at Princeton and the relevance to today’s situation in online brand advertising is incredible.


At iMedia's Brand Summit in early February, the Brand representatives were abuzz with the results of a comScore, Starcom and Tacoda sponsored study about the characteristics of consumers who click on advertisements that showed that only 6% of the online population accounts for 50% of the display ad clicks. And more impactful, those users are mostly lower household income (less than $40,000 annually) and spend up to four times more time online than non-clickers – often frequenting auctions, gambling and career services sites. comScore points out in their release that this is a very different traffic pattern than non-clickers.


The attendees at iMedia were clear that this presented a significant issue for measuring interactive media campaigns – the click through rate may represent a completely off-target audience for brand campaigns. In fact, Starcom commented that there is no correlation between clicks and brand metrics – and there was no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and volume of clicks.


So, what does a brand measure? Often the answer is engagement – with no industry standard measurement. Some people argue that engagement is a factor of time – how long a consumer saw the ad. Some recommend that panel based brand impact surveys are the thing. Others recommend in-campaign surveys. Perhaps the best answer is - "I know engagement when I have engagement."


Prior studies by MediaVest show that consumers are more favorable towards brands they encounter on smaller, niche sites closely aligned with their interests. It appears that engagement requires reach, frequency and placement online not unlike the offline media environment – but online there are many more choices and smaller segments to reach.


As for engagement – consumers want to be heard and brands want to build loyalty. Is this one of those intangibles that counts but cannot be counted? How do you want to measure engagement?

Everything in its valued place

MediaPost's Behavioral Insider featured an interview with Adify CEO Russ Fradin about Making a Place for Placement in considering Behavioral Targeting.


Advertising 101 teaches that success is achieved by controlling placement, optimizing frequency and reach and creating memorable creative. Place your brand in the wrong context and you damage brand equity and potentially create PR nightmares. Saturate a market with your message and you are ignored as background noise – frequency must be controlled. And without reach, what’s the point of the message in the first place?


Recent news evangelizes the considerable virtues of behavioral targeting. It’s intuitively obvious that reaching a consumer who has shown some indication that they’d be interested in your product/service/offer is more valuable that anyone who might randomly be interested. Some vendors have their own “audience” definitions for advertisers to match their own customer analytics again (see Tacoda, Revenue Science). Other vendors help you define your own audience off visitors to your web site (X+1).


But what they don’t emphasize is on what sites your ads will be shown – the pitch is that wherever your customer is on the Internet, these BT ads will find them. Of course, the BT networks serve their advertising mostly across the Top 20 Internet properties where they can efficiently buy inventory to serve these ads – and they buy the cheaper, remnant inventory from those properties which ensures the ads are shown near sub-prime content.


Two problems - first consumers are spending more and more of their time OFF the Top 20 sites. The myriad of behavioral targeting capabilities are limited to approximately 36% of the online visitor time online. Second – your precious brand is associated with sub-prime content.


The rumbling that Google is entering the BT arena is one option to address the 64% of the Internet that your consumers are visiting. Of course, Google isn’t in the business of selecting those sites that have the most premium content, placement or even necessarily content relevant to your business (although they are exceptional at matching the context of your ad to sites designed to attract it).


Adify’s extensive behavioral targeting capabilities enable our advertisers to define their profiles based on their extensive analytics. And all the ads served through BT campaigns on Adify are served on the premium, editorially reviewed, niche sites in premier Vertical Ad Networks such as Warner Brothers MomLogic, Reuters, PeerFlix, Martha’s Circle, Sustain Lane, Advanced Student Marketing, Break and more (over 90 more, actually).


Behavioral Targeting is a good idea for advertisers. But like every other type of advertising, placement, frequency and reach must be balanced. I would argue that online, quality of placement and content is equally important to on-target reach. Advertisers need to complement their large network BT campaigns with appropriate premium vertical ad networks to reap the rewards to insightful, compelling and in-context advertising campaigns.