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.