Peter Shankman, Internet Summit and IAB Q3 Revenue Report

Needless to say, it has been a whirlwind 7 day period in which plenty of things are going on in the interactive world. If you want to ask about my family’s personal tour of the White House we received during the G20 Summit last weekend – then we’re REALLY talking about a whirlwind week (I got to pet Barney without getting bit)! But back to interactive… Peter Shankman was in Raleigh speaking at the TIMA event – and if you have never seen him speak, or don’t follow him on Twitter – or really just don’t know anything about what he’s about – you’re missing out. He’s filled with plenty of stories – and filled with plenty of thoughts and ideas on where the social media/interactive world is going. I’d like to say he speaks with a lot of common sense, but driving 150 miles for a Hardee’s burger pretty much throws that out the window. That being said – he is in tune with modern day technology, and he is well connected and should be followed, tweeted, LinkedIn, etc…

This week was also the inaugural Internet Summit in Chapel Hill… I am happy to say, interactive finally has a major following in the Triangle! The event was sold out (estimated 700+ attendee’s) – and from what I could tell – a smashing success. Bob Young of LuLu and Red Hat fame spoke about how they’re a good company – but should be great if they can get their hands around everything new in interactive. Gian Fulgoni from comScore spoke about online lifts to the offline world. There were plenty of social media “experts” and what seemed to be even more legal folks in attendance. All-in-all – it was an impressive summit and one of the first that I’ve attended that I felt like I actually took more away from it than I paid for. Congrats to the group at CED and Tech Journal for pulling this all off.

And to cap off the week – in this horrible economy we’re in – the Q3 numbers were released by the IAB (which – shameless plug – Media Two is one of only 13 Associate Agency Members) and interactive grew by 11% to a tune of $5.9 Billion last quarter. No – it’s not the 20+ percent we’ve grown accustomed to, but I think you’ll all agree that showing some growth is still a positive. Lot’s going on at Media Two – so more to come, but I have a goal of getting a Twitter account this month. I’ve spoken about it, explained it, followed the phenom (including the latest Motrin/MommyBloggers) – and I think it’s about time I actually joined. Have a good one.

Interactive Media Buying Tips

As I sat on the IAB’s search committee meeting the other day, I started to think about all of the little things that REALLY need to be involved in an interactive media buy that seem to get overlooked. The bottom line I think is that agencies still don’t have enough bodies to do them all as interactive takes a lot more time and effort than a print or traditional campaign – so that being said, I thought I’d point out some of the top things that buyers should be looking to do, starting with incorporating search:

1.Incorporate Search into Everything (AND incorporate Marketing into Search). Agencies still are outsourcing their search to contractors, and although those contractors know how to do search engine architecture, they don’t often understand the basic marketing principles. This is where a traditional agency should be able to accelerate, as they’ve always known marketing – but just couldn’t wrap their arms around interactive. Yet what seems to happen is they follow what their search person tells them to do. Let go of your auto bid optimizers and start analyzing the data. Don’t silo search, and just as important – don’t silo marketing to everything but search.

2. Negotiate your media buy. Sorry sales reps, but right now – we’re pretty sure we have the upper hand. If a client has money to spend, just know that there are 100’s if not 1,000’s of websites that meet your demographic data. Negotiate your media buy to meet your clients objectives. And oh yeah…

3. Know your clients objectives! It’s great to negotiate and get a better deal, but make it a win-win relationship. Publisher reps and vendors want fair value just as much as your client does. Negotiate a deal that hits your client objective and satisfies your publisher. If you can find the sweet spot, then both client and publisher will be happy and continue to grow. In order for that to happen – the media buyer needs to know the publishers metrics, how the clients ads will respond, how they’ll convert and more. So educate yourself before you negotiate. If you don’t know how your clients ads will perform, then you probably need more coordinator experience before taking on a senior media buyer title (Don’t even get me started on agencies that throw around senior level titles so a client feels all warm and fuzzy. Your media buyer either gets it, or they don’t – and yes, it’s that black and white.)

4. Get Flexible. Ask for flexible terms on the media buy. I totally understand that if you cancel the buy outright, you’ll have to find more placements – but if that’s what it takes to meet the objectives, then put the elbow grease into it. We move media buys around several times within the websites before canceling them outright – but you need to have the flexibility from the publishers to make that work, and if it still doesn’t, you need to be able to move on. In the long run, you’ll save the publisher time and money as well – as they’re after the long term relationship just as much as you are.

If you can incorporate from a very high level these four items into your interactive media buy, then when you get into the details and the optimization standards and objectives, you’re going to have at least a leg to stand on.

Why CFOs Don’t Believe in Online Advertising

Just getting caught up on my industry reading and I came across this article titled Why CFOs Don't Believe In Online Advertising. Now, at this point, I tell you why you should care about this article as well. It discussing one fo the most important parts of a direct response campaign - Reporting. The article is about analyzing campaign results and offers some very important elements to keep in mind. These come second nature to savvy direct marketers, but it's nice to have someone put them in writing. So, thank you Stephan Pretorius. Although the article is clearly addressed to "client-side marketers", it is useful for anyone in the industry, no matter what side of the desk you sit. For my entry, we'll focus on the agency side of things.

It starts off discussing data integrity, which is a critical component of the results and analysis, and it will cause a loss in credibility if the accuracy comes into question. That said, there will always be reporting discrepancies. There's no way around it as there's too many "cooks in the kitchen" when tracking an online ad campaign, which is why the IAB has verbiage related to these occurrences to help the situation. However, the best bet is to follow the advice mentioned in the article. Come up with a solid Media Measurement Framework that your client will be comfortable with. This should be decided upon before any impression is served.

All six (counting engagement mapping as it's own point) points are important, but there are a couple that I'd like to highlight in the rest of the blog. First, data integration is extremely important and can be very challenging. I've seen this accomplished two ways, through the adserver or manually. My preference was the backend metrics being plugged into the frontend data through the adserver. This way, it is all together when a report is pulled. Some adservers or client's system are not set up to do this, so the only other way is to integrate the data manually, which is time consuming. This is the step where the discrepancy occurs more often than not.

Quickly, the duplication of conversions when using a performance venue is a huge issue, so measures should absolutely be put into place to de-dupe those.

Lastly, and probably most important, "Make your metrics relevant to your business"! This cannot be stressed more. Custom reporting that speaks to the client's business is what separates Media Two from other agencies. If you followed point 1 and are tracking EVERYTHING, then you will have metrics that you are reporting on that are specific to your client. So, if all of your reports, that you are showing your clients, just have impressions, clicks, cost and conversions, then you are doing an injustice to your client, and more importantly, yourself. Of course, the main objective is to drive sales, but there are a substantial amount of secondary benefits and learnings that can help your client, but you must be able to track and report on them. For example, these can be an email capture, refer a friend or a whitepaper download. Although these may not be your desired actions, these secondary benefits can only help in proving the worth of the online medium within the marketing mix.

In closing, this last point corresponds with the last point in the article. Most of the job postings and resumes I've ever read have something about "staying abreast with industry trends". Even in interviews, you may be asked this very question. My recommendation to you is answer by saying Engagement Mapping. There has been a lot of talk about this reporting feature, and although I do feel it is an excellent feature for your client, it is far from the piece de resistance everyone keeps pushing it as. This goes back to point five in the article. You and your client decide how important it is and how to quantify or assign weight to the touchpoints in the conversion stream, because it should never be a standard allocation.

Wild Week at Media Two

So just so everyone has it - we're now keeping score on our interactive marketing news page, but last week warrants a post of its own...

On Monday, CNN posted a story about Media Two's recent Microsoft win, and how more and more larger firms are choosing the nimble interactive firms to represent them.

On Tuesday, DM News posted a portion of a thought paper on "Driving search conversions with display advertising".

On Wednesday, I spoke to an audience of agency members and marketers alike at the DMA's DM Days conference in New York. The specific topic was on what defines a full service advertising agency - and the answer that the room delivered was a resound "they don't exist anymore". We followed the show up by an in-person meeting at the IAB to discuss the results of the UGC / Social Media event as well as outlining guidelines for the future.

On Thursday - we learned that great results don't always lead to great things, and the David's of the world can always be replaced by the Goliath's of the world's promises (apparently not everyone read the CNN article on Monday). That being said, you can see the roll Media Two is on, and we're excited to continue that roll and focus our efforts on other accounts. Growing a firm with no interactive department or spend to being one of the top 25 interactive advertisers speaks volumes for the talent in this office, and we're looking forward to our next challenge!

On Friday, we resumed our overall great week by being named the #1 internet marketing and design firm in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area by the Triangle Business Journal. That's extremely exciting news - especially seeing as how all of our clients happen to be outside the state of North Carolina!

Not to be outdone of course - on Friday the offices of Media Two were also closed for a good cause... The Learning Together organization in Raleigh put on their annual Tees for Tots program - and it was a smashing success. Media Two was the title sponsor for the 2nd year in a row, and the team I played on destroyed everyone else, posting the highest score in the tournament of 79! P.S. As the title sponsor, we chose to change the rules and say that the high score wins. Thank goodness for interactive marketing!

No Rush Jobs? How about getting a clue (or a process)

I had a call earlier in the week with Steve Hall from AdRants… Specifically, our PR firm wanted to introduce us as he wrote a great article on media optimization trumping creative optimization. During the call – I realized that our personalities and thinking were really right on the same line – and it was refreshing to hear that my thoughts and frustrations were not being felt alone. What was even better was the fact that Steve is a reporter now – and is no longer even active in the day-to-day “doing” that we do here at Media Two Interactive, but yet his thoughts and hopes were much in-line with ours. That all being said – I gather the excitement of the introduction had to do as much with the non-excitement of the earlier IAB call I sat in on that discussed Best Practices for Interactive Campaign Setups.

So for years I talked about how I didn’t think the IAB was doing enough to help out the industry, and now that we’ve joined as one of only 14 advertising agencies – I now understand why it is more and more important for agencies to get more active within the IAB. The presentation centered around everything from handling RFP’s to set up to whatever you would need to know to run a campaign if you were a publisher. The problem was – what stuck in my head the most was the comment that was made of “Do NOT do 24-hour rush jobs for media buyers.”

The point that was trying to be made was that when things are rushed, that’s when accidents happen the most, problems occur, etc… The reality of it is though, is agencies are typically rushed because a client is typically rushing them. Our firm tries to educate all of our clients on the benefits of having at least 2 weeks to do a media plan and buy, but the reality of it is, is sometimes the plan and buy MUST be executed within 24 hours. In which case, as part of Media Two’s “After the Buy” process, we have a set plan in place for executing these rush jobs so that errors and problems don’t occur due to time constraints.

As I now have a much greater appreciation for the IAB and their challenges of educating beginner firms as well as advanced firms, I would implore them to create a follow up series that discusses a best practice for taking the rush job… After all, everyone knows that a publisher isn’t going to turn away revenue – so let’s help them take the revenue and not mess it up. The procedure we go through here requires us to be fast and flexible, and if publishers can’t keep up, then the industry as a whole will suffer the same fate traditional marketers are going through now. Agencies - it's time to get involved so the IAB has a voice on both sides of the fence. Don't let publishers dictate all of the rules - or you may never get a rush job done again.