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As President & CEO, Calvin Lui is responsible for the overall strategy and day-to-day operations of Tumri. Calvin is seasoned online marketing veteran and proven entrepreneur. He has been at the helm of Tumri since January 2008, leading the company in customer wins, partnership deals and product development.

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It’s the Engagement, Stupid

Written on
Feb 12, 2010 
Author
Calvin Lui  |
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It’s the Engagement, Stupid

stupid_smallADOTAS – Throughout the online marketing industry, the buzz is growing about the “next generation of display.” Here are a few themes you might hear passing the water cooler on the way to the CMO’s office this afternoon:

Data: it’s all about picking the right audience

Efficiency: buying and optimizing media is too hard; why not just use an exchange and let the machine do it?

Transparency: are ad networks dead? Or adapting?

Optimize, optimize, optimize: math makes everything better

Dynamic creative: make sure you’re saying the right thing!

Real-time: everything in display will be auctioned off in real time… right?

All of these “new platform” themes promise better ROI, greater efficiency and deeper insights for marketers; and, higher CPMs for publishers. CMO heads are spinning. So much promise, so many platforms… but where’s the payoff?

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that display inventory can be much more effective. Beyond that, though, it gets fuzzy regarding what a marketer should do next.

Should we optimize our media buys? Implement dynamic creative? Test inexpensive inventory on new exchanges and real-time bidding environments? Use a data exchange to find people with real intent?

Or — do all of these at once?

Enabling more relevant conversations between marketers and consumers is the crux to better display advertising. As with any offline conversation, when you market online it’s important to know who you’re talking to, the context of the conversation, when you talk and what you say -– all of these factors are important.

If we apply the conversation analogy to recent innovations in online display marketing, then it leads one to think that maybe display marketers — and the platforms we use — might want to work harder to optimize the entire marketing engagement, rather than the ad.

Today, every consumer engagement in display media involves at least three controllable elements that need to be executed well:

  • Select the Right Audience (media)
  • Present the Right Message/Offer (creative) — the ad
  • Present the Right Post-Click Response (landing page or other)

Where we often miss the mark today is when we optimize only part of this equation, or when we optimize all of the parts — but in silos.

The Wrong Way to Treat a Consumer

Given the way advertising is bought and executed today — i.e., media buys executed separately from creative design and landing page design — it’s understandable why we often act this way. Nevertheless, from the consumer’s standpoint, it’s just dumb.

Consumers want a relevant informational experience, not an ad. That means getting all three elements right during every display marketing engagement. In platform-speak, that’s called “optimization”.

Optimization of engagements requires that the three elements be systematically broken down into components that can be tested independently, but at the same time.

In media, that means describing audiences by demographic, attribution and intent. In creative, that means breaking down ads into core messaging components (such as intro animation, benefit statements, headlines, product image, offer price, call to action, etc.). In response, that means breaking down the post-click experience into messaging components (that, in our experience tend to be quite similar to dynamic creative ad components).

Now, optimizing engagements at a useful scale requires the use of robust, scalable technology that can ingest and make sense of very large data sets and creative assets in multiple formats; then you need to apply algorithms to optimize all components holistically to achieve a specific goal.

The trouble is that many of the data sets contain imperfect and overlapping content, and all of this needs to be done in real time. Not trivial problems, but many of them have already been solved –- just not together in one cohesive execution.

The Quick Win: Deeper, Real-Time Insights

A byproduct of taking a more granular approach to optimizing display engagements is the production of a stream of incredibly deep insights regarding what “engagement recipes” and click streams work best — and why. Insights such as how specific offers and products performed for specific channels, demographics and media are necessary.

Understanding the performance of all of these variables at such a granular level helps a marketer determine the true value of each campaign event (impression, click, conversion, site visit, etc.). This is the type of insight that a lot of vendors and agencies talk about, but few deliver.

The Payoff: Better Performing Display

So what’s the payoff for marketers? By optimizing all three elements at the same time — the audience, the message and the response –- some display advertisers are experiencing huge increases in performance, on the order of 100s to 1000s of percentage gains in ROAS. It’s still early, but the evidence is quite strong that this approach yields substantial improvements in lift, clicks and conversions.

The Long-term Benefit: Digital-as-Proxy

We’re working with leading brands that leverage technology to automate the generation, testing, personalization and optimization of dynamic creative messages.

One reason brands use dynamic creative is because the time and effort it takes to launch complex test campaigns is relatively low, the reach is quite broad and the value of the insights is high. They are executing campaigns not just to “hit a CPA” but also to learn which offers and responses work best with their target audience.

And these findings aren’t surveys – they are records of real actions taken by consumers. It is conceivable that this form of “always-on” insight may eventually serve as a sort of a proxy for the consumer across all channels, both online and offline.

Could the insights gleaned from online display campaigns actually drive the content of television, radio and print ads one day? They just might, if we can get more focused on improving the quality of online engagements with consumers, rather than ads.





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