Online audience targeting has a very promising proposition. Rather than the spray and pray mentality, you handpick your target audience based on billions of data points and powerful predictive analytics and math. The value for advertisers and marketers that the vendors are promising is a razor sharp reach to the target audience and increased effectiveness.

While this may sound like the holy grail of online advertising, why is this revolution “just behind the corner” for so many years? While online search marketing is a $25 billion industry, targeting amounts to only $1 billion according to eMarketer estimates.

This is the question tackled by Rishad Tobaccowala, Member of Management Board at VivaKi, and the keynote speaker at the OMMA Behavioral conference that convened on Thursday in New York.
“We are so concerned about the plumbing that we forget about the poetry,” he argued. “If I have to spend two to three hours per week just to keep on top of what is going on in the targeting industry, it means that it is a very complex industry and that is not trivial. It also means that it is a share game, where too many people are competing for about 1 billion dollars.”

According to Mr. Tobaccowala, vendors are focusing too much on what data they are using and how they structure their database instead of on their clients. The industry has a myriad of acronyms, jargon and terms that are constantly changing and are hard to stay on top of. “The agency people are busy,” he said.
The targeting industry that uses data to understand and target clients is not implementing its own competency on itself. “While the targeting industry has the best tools in the world to understand and target customers, they should implement this talent on growing this industry,”he said. “Furthermore, the industry has positioning itself for private equity and venture capital rather than focusing on customers”.

Mr. Tobaccowala says that the industry should form partnerships with broad offering so that agencies will not have to deal with managing many specialized vendors. “Search, which has $25 billion in revenue, has only three competitors. The behavioral, which is a $1 billion industry, nobody even knows how many competitors there are.”

The industry should think broader about people. They need to think about many aspects of data. “Clients pay money for outcomes, and process.” In process, he said, clients like continuous improvement, and the targeting industry does improve. Clients would like service, which the industry does about 50%. Currently, the industry throws around terms and different approaches. His solution is to form partnerships, since nobody will work with 20 vendors in a $1 billion industry.

As far as outcomes, Mr. Tobaccowala argues, the industry has more challenges. You pay for insights, and this industry is best able to provide insights. Another outcome that you pay for is inspiration, but currently the targeting industry mostly provides desperation and frustration.

The targeting industry needs to think about how to better relate with their audiences. “If you speak only about which data you merge you are not selling your product. I want to have a great shower; I don’t care about the condition of the plumbing.”

Currently, the industry is still in a share of industry battle rather than thinking about how to grow the industry, he said. Share battles are for declining industries; growing industries should have room for everyone.



Ariel Geifman, Research Analyst

How much would you pay to target one of your prospective customers? While this question resonates immediately with search marketers, it is still vague for display advertisers. Nowadays, with audience buying platforms, this question becomes more and more relevant than before. This was one of the questions discussed at OMMA Measurement this week in New York.

“There is a disconnect with traditional marketers, where the value of data comes from its scarcity rather than the quality of it,” says Adam Gerber, the Chief Marketing Officer of Quantcast. “Online, every target has cost per lead, cost per impression, so they need to think whether it has the ROI to pay for the data. Marketers need to see if the cost of the data makes business sense in the value that it brings. There is a difference between a one dollar chocolate bar and a car.”


“We can all buy data, and pay a price, but the question is about the value,” said Darren Herman, President of Varick Media Management. “You need to know what you pay and what you get in return.”
While there is the question of the quality of data, it’s more dependent on price. If the data generates conversions or leads in a cost that makes business sense, low cost low quality data may be valuable. “There is no bad data, just bad price,” concluded Greg Skipper, Director of Networks Strategy at Advertising.com.


According to Mr. Gerber, the thinking around value creation is what makes big businesses. In Search, advertisers price the click and see if it fits into the business model, while in display advertising it doesn’t work this way yet. The members of the panel agreed that it is necessary to take steps in this direction, where marketers look at advertising ROI.


Nevertheless, there is another dimension that comes after you have reached your target audience—engagement. “Engagement is like obscenity,” said Josh Chasin, Chief Research Officer at comScore. “It’s hard to define it, but I know it when I see it.” Engagement is the third dimension beyond reach and frequency. The main issue is that in offline advertising there is no engagement, so it is still in its infancy.

Mr. Gerber thinks that while marketers and advertisers are focused on using data for targeting—getting the best audience to target—they can also use data to create relevant ads. He also believes that engagement is created when the creative is relevant and data can be used to serve more relevant ads.


Ariel Geifman, Research Analyst attending OMMA Measurement

Contemplating whether to choose search or display for your next campaign? How about both? In a new study, Eyeblaster Research explains how the search and display channels complement each other. Each channel works better on a prospective customer at a different stage in the marketing funnel, thus generating touch points all the way from the initial awareness to purchase.


According to the study, each channel plays a unique role in the campaign. While search harvests prospective customers that are already in the marketing funnel, it reaches a limited number of people. Display increases reach by soliciting as many customers as possible and moving them into the funnel.


For the purpose of this study, Eyeblaster Research analyzed hundreds of cross channel search and display campaigns that were delivered through Eyeblaster’s Channel Connect for Search (CC4S). CC4S enables effective management and integration of search and display campaigns, unified reporting and easy comparison of cross channel results. According to the analysis, 72% of the conversions of cross channel

search and display campaigns are a direct result of the display channel while only 28% are the result of the search channel.


Nevertheless, cross channel campaigns create a powerful combination by pushing customers into the
marketing funnel and pulling them towards the purchase. With cross channel search and display campaigns, advertisers can enjoy both worlds—the broad reach of display advertising and the focused targeting of search marketing.


For the full research, follow this link.


Ariel Geifman | Research Analyst

We are pleased to bring you a post by Guest Contributor Martin Meyer-Gossner from The Strategy Web.


Display advertising is the oldest form of online advertising. For years, creative intelligence used big ad space and numerous formats to deliver best possible brand awareness. Display advertising was the no. 1 in online marketing, and seen as THE key in the generation of customer engagement in the Web 1.0 era. Having banner blindness and bad conversion in the back of their heads, all marketers ask, how to create effective online ads to promote company promotions. And ideally these banners should find the engagement economy and generate leads for the businesses.

In today’s social web world, display advertising should have two faces (not only because Facebook won’t sell traditional banners any longer): one for awareness and one for engagement generation campaigns. And for the latter, display advertising faces a tough competitor these days: ads in social networks.

Does this mean social networks have invented a new form of engagement advertising? No – but the philosophy around engagement bannering is changing with their appearance. A question of our clients is: Is the simple creation of a banner with user-centric usability responsible for the road to successful banner campaigns?

In 2000, the silicon business model launched with a product called the “Response Banner” (see reproduced version, left) which carried nearly all call-to-action elements of the Facebook Engagement Ads (right): small picture, offer, call-to-action sentence, a button – click! Knowing how successful these ads performed, I can estimate the success of Facebook engagement ads filling the sales funnel of advertisers with “fans” (not to mention potential customers!).

The Facebook banner intelligence follows our old response banner approach. From a user perspective, the barrier for a user to get engaged with the advertising company is the landing page, obviously the data registration process. This philosophy can be backed by a study showing that in-banner ads generate better lead results than on-site campaigns. Less steps for the user create more conversion.
Community banner ads can be far more intelligent than traditional ones. The creative is connected with the community- database. Thus, it is easy to understand and to use for the community members. Plus, it delivers great community service. And the banners have great brand recognition value – they all look alike and just the text varies.

If the registration process is pre-organized, the user accepts the data registration much quicker, more often and again and again. It is just one click! Facebook offers this “one-click-makes-customers-happy-service”. And I am sure we will see other social networks learning from this case.

Knowing that recommendation marketing through peers is essential for business success in the future, Facebook ads are even cleverer. They carry a recommendation element which lets us know who of our peers has already interacted with the banner. For months, I have been asking myself why we don’t see companies and their agencies placing traditional banners with recommendation elements…

Spot On!

Many posts or books have been written about the essential creative elements of banners. We will still need traditional colorful and flashy banners that cause emotions – but for awareness campaigns! Engagement bannering is different, and it can be quite simple as we have seen, right?

Now, just imagine every person had one easy manageable individual landing page which they can personalize from campaign to campaign, from network to network, from community to community – just by using Facebook-, Google- or Twitter Connect?

Welcome, new engagement advertising philosophy…

Martin Meyer-Gossner is sales and marketing expert and co-founder of the IT B2B platform silicon.de. With his social business brand The Strategy Web Martin helps business decision makers to understand what a modern (web) business strategy needs and how to provide top customer service in the future.

Chocapic, the chocolate cereal from Nestlé, is promoting its sponsorship of the new movie “Arthur and the revenge of Maltazard” with an Augmented Reality application that turns the cereal package into a game console. The online portion of the campaign, recently featured on the Creative Zone, has a teaser game that can be played with or without a webcam.

A great post was written originally on Jawbone.TV about the Chocapic Augmented Reality campaign and we would like to thank its author, Todd Denis, for letting us re-post the blog for our readers. Enjoy.

At first glance, the cereal box game for Nestle’s Chocapic (promoting ‘Arthur the Revenge of Maltazard’) seems to be yet another ill-conceived augmented reality (AR) marketing experiment (see ‘40 Augmented Reality Projects Sure To Blow Your Mind … Or Just Blow’). However, when you look at the fundamental interactivity at play, it’s not difficult to see the real possibilities of AR as a legitimate story, game and entertainment tool.

In this case, we’re dealing with what equates to a stand-alone hand-held maze game. Doesn’t get much simpler than that, but the impact on engagement is huge. Comparative to the cool yet fleeting ‘display and rotate’ variety of most AR (see GE Smart Grid or Star Trek Enterprise), the Chocapic game has more in common with outstanding AR spatial memory game levelHead.

But, whereas levelHead is believed to be locked in a vault somewhere being commercially developed, the Chocapic game is using primitive yet massive marketing reach (the backs of kid’s cereal boxes) to introduce similar game play, albeit on a more limited scale.

This is the way it’s supposed to work. New technology marries with existing distribution to create a whole new experience. Certainly, the Nestle undertaking is bone-simple, but imagine if certain addictive AR games or puzzles were mass-distributed as part of a transmedia campaign, where unlocking the games released key story information that pushed participants to channels otherwise hidden, like special blogs or subversive web narratives.

Suddenly, the back of a cereal box goes from an AR trinket used by perhaps .001 percent of the recipients (still happy with those results Best Buy?), to a valuable and re-playable piece of a larger story puzzle. That’ll get some people leaning forward.

And as a closing thought, why not make the entire box package something that can be used as part of the story? Half to create a playing surface, and the other half to create a wearable set of AR goggles (like the crude ones you can build following the video instructions at recomblu.com – see video below).

I wouldn’t want to walk the streets with a Chocapic branded gear box on my face, but I’ll bet there are thousands of kids who would steal daddy’s iphone to make it happen.

Jawbone Lab is a consultancy and management company that operates Jawbone.tv, the Web’s most relevant destination for narrative in the digital age. The Lab provides digital strategy services for unconventional marketing, communication and entertainment, combining access to a global network of talent from across all media with more than a decade of experience creating digital and interactive projects.