NEWSLETTER #77/ AUGUST 6, 2017
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IS PROGRAMMATIC BUYING MORE EFFICIENT?
There is so much questionable "information" floating around about online advertising that it is very hard to know what and whom to believe.
One of the things we take for granted is that programmatic (automated) buying is a money saver. It may have problems like a higher incidence of bots, or "unsafe" environments, but we assume the cost savings of automated buying buoyed by the presumed economic advantages of tracking and retargeting make the downsides economically acceptable.
There is some new research that strongly refutes this.
I have mentioned Dr. Augustine Fou before. He is an independent researcher. This week he released a study of 100 million online ad exposures and his conclusion was that buying online display ads directly from quality publishers is at least 8 times as efficient as buying the same amount of advertising through a programmatic ad exchange.
Below is a table (mine) summarizing Dr. Fou's findings. As you can see, Dr. Fou found that both bots and viewability issues are far less pronounced when buying directly. Additionally, quality publishers do not charge for ad blocked "exposures" because they don't call the ad in the first place
Without over-complicating the issue, Dr. Fou also reminds us that just because a view can't be definitively identified as a bot, doesn't mean it is necessarily a human. When he counts only the views that can be confirmed as humans, the difference in efficiency grows enormously. While 61% of views on quality sites can be confirmed as human, on programmatically bought sites he could only confirm 16% of views as definitely human.
This takes the efficiency ratio from about 8:1 to about 27:1. Put another way, the odds of getting an absolutely, positively "human viewable" impression is somewhere between 8 and 27 times more unlikely when buying programmatically.
The questions for an advertiser are:
- Is the current caveman version of ad tech and programmatic buying (based on tracking and data leakage) saving me money, or costing me money?
- Is automated buying making my buys more efficient or just creating efficiencies for my agency?
- Can I believe any of the reports I get?
Totalitarian Marketing Update
A few weeks ago we reported that Google is no longer satisfied just spying on everything we do online, they are now stalking us through our credit card transactions in the real world. They have obtained the credit card records of 70% of the US population.
According to the Washington Post, a legal complaint with the FTC was filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Foundation this week claiming that "Google is newly gaining access to a trove of highly sensitive information -- the credit and debit card purchase records of the majority of U.S. consumers -- without revealing how they got the information or giving consumers meaningful ways to opt out."
More spy news: A class action suit was filed in federal court against Disney and Warner Bros for illegally and secretly tracking the web movements of children. Lovely.
Worldwide Pain-In-The-Ass
The Financial Report (Australia's Wall Street Journal) did a nice feature on me last week. You can find it here.
In Europe, The Drum (an online marketing mag) had a column about millennials in which I was interviewed. You can read the whole column here, or just the interview here.
Going to Sydney in a few weeks for some mouthing-off. I'll be doing the keynote at the ReThink TV event sponsored by Think TV, Australia's TV trade association on September 14th. Admission is open and free, just sign up here.
I'll also be doing a private event for the great people at MadClarity.
