Trans-Media Self-Service Web Ad Sales: Tantalizing but Tricky
SAN JOSE -- Unified online systems for buying ads in any medium and monitoring their performance will transform Madison Avenue by cutting costs, smashing walls in agencies, drawing small clients and putting at all advertisers’ fingertips more and better data for comparing their returns on investment by medium than ever. Executives at Kelsey Group’s Drilling Down on Local conference here late Tues. called that vision almost as challenging to reach as it is certain. “That has to get here and it will get here,” creating a “sea change the next 3-5 years,” said CEO Shawn Riegsecker of interactive media planning buying firm Centro/Integrent.
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The concept presents an “increasingly attractive value proposition to advertisers of all sizes,” said Justin Wong, Google dir.-strategic partner initiatives. But each medium has its own way of doing business, and an overarching Web “dashboard essentially needs to create efficiencies across all those media.” Big variations and unsettled questions exist as to the “conversion event” -- when an ad is judged to have done its job and the responsibility of closing the deal lands on the advertiser, said Warren Kay, dir.-emerging products, Yahoo search mktg.
The winner: “whoever can figure out how to integrate all the complexity on the back end,” said Marc Barach, Ingenio chief mktg. officer. No, “it’s who owns the advertiser,” said Sloan Gaor, strategic initiatives vp with Miva. Whoever it is, “it’s got to be an independent third party,” Riegsecker said. “Google can’t necessarily own the platform,” since its status as an ad medium creates a conflict of interest, he said. Google’s Wong didn’t respond.
Technology is running “about 10 years ahead” of small business operators’ ability to exploit fully data becoming available, Barach said. But Spot Runner CEO Nick Grouf said his firm’s research shows that “local businesses are very comfortable in a self-service environment if they get the information they need.” Advertising’s creative side is tricky enough that it often will require more individualized help for advertisers, they agreed.
Yellow pages publishers are in the catbird seat, thanks to the advertiser trust they've built, said Gaor, whose firm is allied with Verizon. The Bell this week said it will resell Google advertising (WID March 28 p 5). “If it works with Google,” Verizon will widen it “to other mediums,” said Gaor, disclaiming access to any inside information. The carrier already is acting as an ad agency, and its success will earn it an “agency markup” on ad dollars, he said.
The panel discussion was prompted by Google’s acquisition of radio advertising firm dMarc and emergence of Spot Runner -- a Web-based agency that has prepared several ads in each of about 5,000 small-business categories for advertisers to pick by self-service and modify with individual photos, voiceovers or text, for placement on TV and cable -- a meeting organizer said. About 1,000 real estate commercials have been created, and Spot Runner recently was named the agency of record for 260,000 agents with 4 large real estate agencies, Grouf said. The result “looks absolutely smashing side by side with an IBM or a Coca-Cola” commercial on TV, he said. But Wong objected, saying many a small business operator would call the choices and information analysis presented “'Too much for me,'” and plead, “'Can you just do it for me?'”