The Great Unwatched(nytimes.com)
nytimes.com
The Great Unwatched
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/business/the-great-unwatched.html
7 comments
>The crux of the problem is that the number of video ads that agencies and brands want to run far exceeds the amount of quality inventory — that is, well-placed video players on prestigious sites, like, say, Nationalgeographic.com. When the premium space fills up, media buyers start looking for video players in less coveted online real estate.
from my uninformed position as a viewer of advertising, it seems like the opposite of this is true. On any site i would consider premium (e.g. hulu, youtube, theonion, and yes, nationalgeographic) my biggest pet peeve with advertising is that they have more ad blocks to fill than they do advertisements, and they have to keep re-using the same ads over and over again. surely the advertiser doesn't want to pay for me to see the same 15-second video ad a half-dozen times in a row on a single visit, do they?
from my uninformed position as a viewer of advertising, it seems like the opposite of this is true. On any site i would consider premium (e.g. hulu, youtube, theonion, and yes, nationalgeographic) my biggest pet peeve with advertising is that they have more ad blocks to fill than they do advertisements, and they have to keep re-using the same ads over and over again. surely the advertiser doesn't want to pay for me to see the same 15-second video ad a half-dozen times in a row on a single visit, do they?
Yeah, it is just crazy; I watched an entire season of a television show on either NBC or CBS's website, and I remember them only having three advertisements that I got to watch over and over and over again; sometimes the ad would end, but the slot was timed for two ads, so it would show me the same ad a second time. I don't even dislike watching ads normally, and this was driving me insane.
I wouldn't be so sure that this isn't exactly what they want. Consciously you get annoyed, but it's those same ads that pop into your head from your subconscious every once in a while.
At least you can close the browser window...
Anecdote: about a decade ago, on the Lichfield to Redditch railway line, some bright spark decided to install video screens on the trains that played news clips and adverts. The sound level was idiotically high. The screens were positioned all along the main part of each carriage. There was a token 'quiet' section at the remote end of each carriage which did not have any form of sound insulation between it and the main part of the carriage.
The initiative lasted about 6 months. Rail staff told me that the level of vandalism targeted specifically on the equipment was the worst they had seen (some of the train staff had worked out how to jam the DVD-ROM players in the steel boxes to prevent worse damage to the kit). The jingles used to advertise the local car insurance (! on a commuter train !) brokers and estate agents still haunt my dreams. I will never buy anything from any of the local advertisers, many who have now gone bankrupt. I remember actually seeing a cafe bar that had been advertised on this system and crossing the road to get away purely by reflex action.
Can anyone explain why Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here official video on YouTube shows a shampoo advert aimed at young women? I mean, Gil wasn't exactly a male grooming icon if you know what I mean. Targeting appears off...
Anecdote: about a decade ago, on the Lichfield to Redditch railway line, some bright spark decided to install video screens on the trains that played news clips and adverts. The sound level was idiotically high. The screens were positioned all along the main part of each carriage. There was a token 'quiet' section at the remote end of each carriage which did not have any form of sound insulation between it and the main part of the carriage.
The initiative lasted about 6 months. Rail staff told me that the level of vandalism targeted specifically on the equipment was the worst they had seen (some of the train staff had worked out how to jam the DVD-ROM players in the steel boxes to prevent worse damage to the kit). The jingles used to advertise the local car insurance (! on a commuter train !) brokers and estate agents still haunt my dreams. I will never buy anything from any of the local advertisers, many who have now gone bankrupt. I remember actually seeing a cafe bar that had been advertised on this system and crossing the road to get away purely by reflex action.
Can anyone explain why Gil Scott-Heron's I'm New Here official video on YouTube shows a shampoo advert aimed at young women? I mean, Gil wasn't exactly a male grooming icon if you know what I mean. Targeting appears off...
i'm pretty sure that only works over a period of time. an advertiser wants me to see their ad every day for a month. i can't imagine paying for a half dozen impressions over a single session is valuable.
Exactly. It's repetition. Maybe you don't click, but you do receive the same message 15 times. That has consequences ... Maybe not with you in particular, but averaged out across the audience, yes.
The problem is that it's not in the organizational mindset of agencies that mostly do creative work and expect to be able to hand it over to another company that specializes in buying media space.
You can see the ad networks as opportunistic parasites that take advantage of over-specialization in ad-land. Fancy creatives that have next to no tech knowledge get their budgets gobbled by people with some measure of tech capability and no ethics. The 'outsource everything but your core competency' only works when you can trust everyone that you are outsourcing to.
The lack of quality inventory is also something of a canard. Direct buying and selling requires ::effort::, thinking, spending on expertise, and salespeople. Dumping ads into a network that quotes absurd numbers and promises everything requires pressing a button and going to get coffee.
It's like the Somali pirates -- they identified a bunch of ships that had no defenses and corporations that would barf out millions of dollars when you point guns at a few sailors. A $500 weapons budget could hold a multi-billion dollar cargo hostage. It's similar with ad piracy.
You can see the ad networks as opportunistic parasites that take advantage of over-specialization in ad-land. Fancy creatives that have next to no tech knowledge get their budgets gobbled by people with some measure of tech capability and no ethics. The 'outsource everything but your core competency' only works when you can trust everyone that you are outsourcing to.
The lack of quality inventory is also something of a canard. Direct buying and selling requires ::effort::, thinking, spending on expertise, and salespeople. Dumping ads into a network that quotes absurd numbers and promises everything requires pressing a button and going to get coffee.
It's like the Somali pirates -- they identified a bunch of ships that had no defenses and corporations that would barf out millions of dollars when you point guns at a few sailors. A $500 weapons budget could hold a multi-billion dollar cargo hostage. It's similar with ad piracy.
Direct buying and selling requires ::effort::, thinking, spending on expertise, and salespeople. Dumping ads into a network that quotes absurd numbers and promises everything requires pressing a button and going to get coffee.
This.
Online advertsing is a micro-transactions model. With print and Tv you have a single touch-point with the publisher or network, and they have a single-pipe-channel to N users. With online, the content is de-fragmented into individual sales units on an individual users screen. Each pixel of real-estate is de-bundled and needs to be bought/sold/negotiated. That is a massive amount of cognitive overhead on the business side. And, on the creative side...there is way too much variation/uncertainty about the context to fully tailor the creative elements to each user/context (way too expensive). This explains the huge "value add" of reducing complexity. If you can sell remnants with a 1-click solution, you just saved somebody some pain. And that guy/gal has a budget and needs to make numbers...so you can negotiate a cut.
This.
Online advertsing is a micro-transactions model. With print and Tv you have a single touch-point with the publisher or network, and they have a single-pipe-channel to N users. With online, the content is de-fragmented into individual sales units on an individual users screen. Each pixel of real-estate is de-bundled and needs to be bought/sold/negotiated. That is a massive amount of cognitive overhead on the business side. And, on the creative side...there is way too much variation/uncertainty about the context to fully tailor the creative elements to each user/context (way too expensive). This explains the huge "value add" of reducing complexity. If you can sell remnants with a 1-click solution, you just saved somebody some pain. And that guy/gal has a budget and needs to make numbers...so you can negotiate a cut.
> organizational mindset
Most marketing agencies are owned by a handful of large conglomerates, so this is by design to a great degree. Even when the creative and the media people are under the same roof, they may be entirely separate organizations with their own profit targets.
Most marketing agencies are owned by a handful of large conglomerates, so this is by design to a great degree. Even when the creative and the media people are under the same roof, they may be entirely separate organizations with their own profit targets.
It's an interesting business, where there is little or no demand for the "product" from the person who ultimately consumes it. So you have to figure out ways to trick and/or force the end-consumer to actually consume the product that you have invested so much effort in producing.
While I agree that most of the ads you see online today are not desired, I would argue that it does not have to be this way. When advertising is done right, it can open consumers up to products that they wouldn't know exist without ads. It actually creates value for both the buyer and the seller. A music news site [0] I tend to visit used to be a shining example of this--ads promoting new records by bands featured on the site could be seen in their banners and fit seemlessly with the rest of the page, now they've been replaced by McDonald's and Dr Pepper across large portions of the site. I've found out about new albums that I may not have otherwise listened to when ads were relevant; now that the site's admin realizes that fast food pays more than indie record labels I'll leave AdBlock enabled.
[0] http://www.absolutepunk.net
[0] http://www.absolutepunk.net
Agreed, I like watching coming attractions trailers before a movie, or having suggestions turn up in Spotify.
However, in the latter case, I've already purchased the product, so the "advertising" is actually an in-product enhancement pointing me at getting more value out of what I've already paid for. I wonder if I would be so interested in the cross-promotions if I had to pay for new tracks or albums every time.
However, in the latter case, I've already purchased the product, so the "advertising" is actually an in-product enhancement pointing me at getting more value out of what I've already paid for. I wonder if I would be so interested in the cross-promotions if I had to pay for new tracks or albums every time.
Yeah, I pretty much immediately close any web page that has an auto play video on it. If I get a link from a friend and a video plays before it, I just close it. No interest in that stuff, especially when I'm browsing at work.
Remember when people said Google paid too much for Youtube?
Pretty soon it will look like the bargain of the century.
Pretty soon it will look like the bargain of the century.
It pretty much has already, for a couple of years (particularly in the context of recent comparably sized purchases like whatsapp)
Edit: I was thinking of instagram, whatsapp was about 15x as expensive as YouTube.
Edit: I was thinking of instagram, whatsapp was about 15x as expensive as YouTube.
I despise sites that not only auto-run ads but have multiple ones on the same page that auto-run together. Of course they probably have no idea since the ads come from somewhere else from somewhere else from somewhere else.
I've never seen them. In fact the biggest surprise of this article is that video adverts exist. Using NoScript + youtube-dl, and not having Flash or an H.264 codec installed, is working well for me.
The NYT's piece on unwatched ads contains not fewer than four below-the-fold <div>s containing display ads from which the paper will likely receive no revenue.
Why is this agency buying through a network instead of doing it themselves? They could just do managed placements rather than just tossing it to a network who does the same thing with less of a direct incentive to serve the client. The networks lack skin in the game and have an incentive to play the hear no evil speak no evil see no evil charade.
This is part of the reason why a lot of online media is such trash. Ad budgets are getting siphoned off by fraud at scale. If the internet's entire purpose is to connect people with the information that they need as quickly as possible, then this purpose is being circumvented. Instead they are getting junk masquerading as information.
The Daily Caller quote is also a canard. They get paid junk rates because they are offering junk space and have junk site performance and a broken mobile website. Media companies would treat it as serious if their papers printed incorrectly half the time or the signal turned to static or had odd color hue on TV. On the web shoddy workmanship is considered acceptable.
The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires no salespeople.
This is part of the reason why a lot of online media is such trash. Ad budgets are getting siphoned off by fraud at scale. If the internet's entire purpose is to connect people with the information that they need as quickly as possible, then this purpose is being circumvented. Instead they are getting junk masquerading as information.
The Daily Caller quote is also a canard. They get paid junk rates because they are offering junk space and have junk site performance and a broken mobile website. Media companies would treat it as serious if their papers printed incorrectly half the time or the signal turned to static or had odd color hue on TV. On the web shoddy workmanship is considered acceptable.
The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires no salespeople.
> The DC and countless other sites could charge higher if they just sold more direct. Whatever happened to 'disintermediation?' Instead they hand over the inventory to a few lines of javascript because it's easy, lazy, and requires no salespeople.
It's very hard to sell directly. You have to have significant scale for advertisers to even be interested in talking to you, and even if you reach that scale it requires a whole sales staff and tech support which, frankly, most (digital) publishers just don't have.
It's very hard to sell directly. You have to have significant scale for advertisers to even be interested in talking to you, and even if you reach that scale it requires a whole sales staff and tech support which, frankly, most (digital) publishers just don't have.
Hard? Sure. Scale? Not as much as you think. Local newspapers all over the country somehow manage to hit $10 cpm for direct sales. I don't dispute that having a sales team isn't hard or potentially expensive. One of the reason why digital is such a laggard in a lot of markets is because of the fraud sapping budgets.
I'm seeing a lot of NY Times articles on HN lately, and it's pretty lame stuff too. Is it my imagination or is HN and NYT in cahoots?
Why doesn't the video market clear? Do clients just refuse to pay enough for the good space? Don't tell me they know how much that ad space is worth to them in revenue.
I worked at an adtech startup for two years --- we only barely touched on video, but the dynamics are still there. Buyers plan on the scale of D-Day but there's really no place to do that --- there's no halftime superbowl ad on the internet, just a billion little things that have slightly different definitions of every single thing involved. What's an inch when screens are different sizes and the site has responsive design? What if you've got something built around 4:3 or 16:9 and their site is the opposite? What counts as adult, exactly? Bet it isn't the same in Northbrook IL as it in Palo Alto).
It's a big mess, and the things that put buyers' minds at ease aren't the same that make them money.