More education is needed to boost uptake of private ad exchanges, by newmediaage

by agenda21 on 24/01/2012

Read the comments of our co-founder Pete Robins talking about private ad exchanges. What is your view? We want to hear from you:

The industry has called for more education about private ad exchanges to increase uptake, following news that Collective has launched the first real-time private ad exchange for premium video programming in the UK.
Ad exchanges promise to deliver a more effective and efficient way of buying and selling advertising online. Real-time bidding (RTB) on exchanges enables the buying and selling of single ad impressions in real time.

Despite the huge promise of exchanges, they have been held up by a nervousness among publishers, which fear losing control over advertising on their site. The introduction of private ad exchanges could ease these worries though as they enable premium publishers to connect only to the advertisers they choose.

Pete Robins, Agenda21 founder, linkened ad exchanges to eBay. “You might say, ‘I’m going to sell this watch and the minimum price I want for it is £30’,” he said. “If no-one bids for it at £30, you don’t sell it, but if people want it, then you might sell it at £50. But with a private exchange, you might say I still want £30 but I’m only going to let certain people bid because I don’t want it on the open market. It gives you more control.”
Robins added that private ad exchanges offer advertisers and media owners an increased level of protection, but as they are in their relative infancy, people will need to be patient because there will be an initial element of trial and error.
“Nobody has the answer just yet,” he said. “People obviously want to monetise as much of their inventory as possible and buyers are becoming much smarter about which bits they want and the different prices that they’re prepared to pay. You’ve got people on both the buying and selling side actually genuinely wanting a market place where you’re paying and earning the right price for the value of the media you’ve got or you want to buy. The understanding of how to do that with the technology has advanced a lot in the last year.”
However, he also warns that it is imperative to have the right people in place for it to be successful. “Even if you’ve got the best technology and best inventory, if you don’t have the right people or processes to know how to run it then it’s not going to work,” he said. “And those are really difficult to find because it’s such a new part of the market.”
To read the whole article click here

{ 0 comments }

Sharpened Reflexes – innovation update on Real-time bidding (Marketing Week article)

by agenda21 on 23/01/2012

agenda21 and our client-Sporting Bet were recently mentioned in Marketing Week’s Digital Strategy supplement on Real-time bidding.

One of marketing’s biggest problems has always been that, until recently, the very last stage in the buying process was out of the brand’s hands. A company could plan its campaign to the finest detail, but once media space was bought, it had very little say about which individuals ads were shown to and precisely when.
Real-time bidding (RTB) is changing this. The practice, which enables brands to select an audience and bid for each impression online through automated auction systems, puts companies back in the driving seat because they can use the viewer data to offer them a fitting individual message.

The Internet Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) mobile and networks manager Amit Kotecha says that while his organisation is not currently measuring RTB as a portion of the overall advertising market, it is planning to open a counsel for the practice later this year. It will give practitioners and interested brands a forum to discuss the opportunities of the latest development in online display.

“It’s the really hot topic in display for the year ahead so we’re going to be doing a lot of education work,” he says. “It’s a very small proportion of overall online display but it’s going to grow significantly because everyone stands to gain. Publishers should maximise their yield and advertisers can push forward with the most cost-effective and best-targeted campaigns possible.”
Sportingbet digital media and operations manager Jacklyn Low says she has been working with Agenda21 to look into this area. Although, like many brands, it will look at which website a potential customer is on and examine recent anonymised browsing history, it has also built up models of how its most lucrative customers behave.

This modelling allows the brand to look forward at the life-time value (LTV) of a potential ‘punter’ and base a bidding decision on looking forwards as well as back. Like any bookmaker, Sportingbet is most keen for its message to be put in front of keen gamblers. A person who only places a single bet a year, normally for a big occasion such as the Grand National, is far less attractive.
“Life-time tracking of current customers allows us to identify the potential LTV of prospective customers and consequently how much we bid for an impression,” Low says. “We can identify people who have previously been to sports sites, or target them contextually while they are there. We can also use data that shows what people search for, including the sports content and the keywords they use.

“A lot of this data is given away by the cookies on people’s machines, because we can see where they have been and their surfing behaviour,” she adds. “We can also infer their age and demographic, depending on their behaviours. Between this, bought data and supplier technology, we can build up substantial personas.”
To read the whole article click here

{ 0 comments }

Google’s latest social media move is a wake up call, say agencies, by newmediaage

by agenda21 on 23/01/2012

Read below article by nma quoting our Head of Natural Media – Monique Slater.

Brands must ramp up their Google+ strategies to capitalise on Google’s evolving personalised search service, according to agencies.
Their comments follow the news that Google is integrating its social network Google+ further into its natural search results with the service Search Plus Your World (nma.co.uk 10 January 2012).

The service, which features natural search listings alongside photos and posts from an individual or brand’s Google+ Circles and Picasa accounts, is rolling out across google.com for logged-in users.

The move has triggered a backlash from Twitter, which believes the changes give Google’s social network an unfair advantage in the natural search listings, while harming the effectiveness of Twitter’s real-time information service. It released a statement saying that the changes will be “bad for people, publishers, news organisations and Twitter users.”

The new service is the latest step in Google’s ongoing personalised search strategy, and has therefore not come as a surprise to agencies. However, they believe the news will force a shake-up in the market.

Agenda 21’s head of natural media Monique Slater said the changes are “frightening” for SEO agencies, which will have to fundamentally change the way they optimise websites. She said the past few years have seen social media results gradually integrated into Google, with the result that agencies have become adept at optimising social assets including Facebook pages, Twitter communications, websites and videos.

“Although we have known this is coming, it is still probably the largest change Google has ever made to its results, and the fact Google+ now dominates search results when the personalised service is switched on is a worry,” she said. “Brands must start using Google+ more and understand more about the Circles functionality, and not mistake it as being identical to Facebook. It’s very important brands become more active on Google+ now.”

To read the whole article, click here

{ 0 comments }

Hannah Amess judging this year’s MOA awards

by agenda21 on 16/11/2011

Our very own Hannah Amess was one of the eight judges at the
IPA’s first Media Owner Awards (the MOA) ceremony on 15th November,
which are designed to showcase best practice from online media owners and to
raise the digital standard. Hannah played an imperative part in reviewing and marking
every award submission together with other judges.

We are very happy to have seen our client  Save the Children being shortlisted together
with the MSN for their royal wedding campaign.

Go online and check it all out for yourself here: www.ipamoa.co.uk/Home

{ 0 comments }

Google New Match Types: Near Exact and Near Phrase Coming Soon…

by agenda21 on 11/11/2011

Matt Holland, head of PPC, agenda21

Google’s latest innovation for PPC advertisers is coming soon as they are offering new match types for advertisers. The new match types will be ‘near exact‘ and ‘near phrase‘ match types which will be in addition to the Broad, Broad Match Modified, Phrase and Exact match types.

From the 14th November Google will be running this new beta test match types that will slightly broaden the reach of Exact and Phrase match keywords with syntactic variants including; plurals, misspells, acronyms and abbreviations but not synonyms.  The idea being that this will be for advertisers who wish to increase their coverage and volume on Exact and Phrase match keywords and help them find incremental traffic with minimum effort.

Personally, I look forward to these match types from Google as it will be easier for advertisers to extend the reach of keywords without having to build out massive keyword lists whilst still maintaining a level of control that is not offered when using Broad match on keywords.  However, advertisers still need to be wary of how they use these match types on high traffic generic terms. For example if you now Near Exact match on the term ‘credit card’ you will also show for the term ‘credit cards’ which as can be seen below receives 110,000 searches a month in the UK where as ‘credit card’ received 22,000 local monthly searches according to Google’s Traffic Estimator.

Near Exact Match

However, this is the desired effect that Google would be looking for, as by introudcing these new match types it will increase Google’s revenues from PPC advertisers in two ways:

1. Advertisers will now expand their reach on to new keywords increasing the amount of auctions that an advertiser is enter in too.

2. Advertisers being introduced to these new auctions (due to the increase in reach from their keywords) the existing advertisers who were on these keywords (such as credit cards) will see more competition come in to that auction which will result in an increase in CPC’s.

It remains to be seen as to whether these match types will be an option that you can negative match by, which would allow advertisers further control over their keywords and the auctions that they enter into but we will let you know more about this if/when we find out more.

If you have any questions/comments about this latest innovation from Google, please get in touch with us. We’d like to hear your comments as to why you think Google have called these match types ‘near exact’ and ‘near phrase’ rather than exact/phrase match modified?

{ 0 comments }

← Previous Entries