Searching For Value At ad:tech
Tuesday, April 20, 2010 at 11:49PM At a trade show targeted at digital marketers, I spent the day listening to some of the worst marketing pitches I've heard: muddled value propositions, mushy messaging and murky benefits. Among the search engine optimizers, data analytics engines, and ad networks I wandered and repeatedly asked, what is it you do? How do you differentiate what you offer? How do you make money?
I was struck by the moments I felt like I might drown in data. It seems it isn't hard to marry a web crawler together with proprietary algorithim to analyze the data, and voila! You've got a cleverly titled social media buzz-o-meter. Benchmark and baseline with top 100 publishers, or buy their long tail inventory anonymously through a cookie marketplace.
You can pay someone to build a mobile app which you can distribute on whichever platform you want or you can build your own. Those same companies might sell you their ad inventory across a patchworked network of clients whose apps they also built. Or you can buy whatever ad product Google and Facebook offer within their properties. You can target offers in someone else's registration process and through rich media platforms.
And you can automatically generate campaigns and reports based on keywords extracted from data about your products, brand or target customers. In the end, as many of my engineering colleagues have told me over the years, isn't market-making and brand building more of a science than an art?
Walking around the Exhibit Hall searching for value, at times it felt like the industry had been taken over by used car salesmen. I can pay someone $11 to write a sponosred tweet or $30 to write a sponsored Blog post. As a brand guardian, the rep suggested I shouldn't be worried if it is authentically delivered by the mercenary Twitterer who may or may not use the product, let alone actually care about it. "You can just review all the proposed tweets and then publish only the ones that work for you." Garbage in, garbage out.
Impressions, reach, followers and fans. When you want to count something to show how many potential customers see your messages, there are many products to help you report on their cookies, their accounts, and their visits. But which are the valuable metrics? Which predict loyalty? engagement? translate into revenue? After a day at the show, it feels like the volume metrics that social media has encouraged - gathering followers or fans - encourage quantity not quality measurements.