Where You Should Stick Your Ad and Why

Joseph Carrabis
Media Planning & Buying Posted on June 22, 2007

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Media buyers and planners need to know as much about the target group of an ad as possible. The more knowledge they have, the better their chances are for communicating the right message and for having that message acted upon by their target audience. At some level, the fact that knowing these cultural and psychonomic tidbits about your target audience might not be important belies the concepts behind product placement: such blasphemy!

NextStage's Ad Placement Tool, based on cultural and psychonomic target audience knowledge, is really nothing more than the science of product placement applied to the web.

My deep thanks to NextStage's Susan Carrabis, Bill Ford and Shauna Shaw for helping with the writing of this paper, to Avenue A| Razorfish, Casale Media, FindMeFaster (using the tool for SEO work), ICON International, Underscore Marketing and others for helping NextStage develop and perfect the Ad Placement Tool, and for allowing NextStage to acknowledge their experience with, training on and use of the tool in this column. Also special thanks to Avenue A| Razorfish's Debrianna Obara, VP of Media, for reviewing this paper and her invaluable suggestions.

Coming soon:
• Listen to AllBusiness.com's Chris Bjorklund interview Joseph Carrabis on The Importance of Viral Marketing

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Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. Read full bio. He was recently selected as a senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research.

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Comments

Joseph Carrabis
Joseph Carrabis August 28, 2008 at 8:30 AM

Rob, Sorry I didn't see this until now. "Many actionable solutions"? Well, we do have that tool that determines where ads should be placed based on user responses to some questions.
Are there some general rules? How general would you like them? "For boomer males do x except when marketing high end cars or when there's a slightly younger female in the creative or the product is an OTC or ..."
I know the goal is to make things as simple as possible and sometimes the simplest solution results in the 30 or so questions we currently ask (and I'm happy to learn there's a simpler solution with as high an accuracy). This isn't a defense (as I hope you'll agree I'm always working to improve things and enjoy discovering alternate methods that simplify things and freely recommend them).
Developing the tool and this article was quite an experience for me. I was shocked to learn about the disconnects that exist(ed) in the system -- who didn't talk to whom, who didn't know what and couldn't find out. Something as simple as not knowing where (on what sites) the creative would show up, hence essentially shooting in the dark and hoping you were at least shooting in the direction of the target. You reference this in your "hysterical/horrifying ad/story combinations".
"...there are still a number of moving parts that need to be addressed..." Agreed. And quite willing to discuss.
And thanks for reading my column. - Joseph

Rob Graham
Rob Graham June 22, 2007 at 1:39 PM

I enjoyed the article and found is very interesting. I'm a bit biased perhaps as Joseph is a friend of mine. However, from a practicality standpoint I'm not sure he was able to offer many actionable solutions. Joseph has accurately pointed out that there are a number of shortcomings regarding ad placement that few of us would dispute. However, I don't think he is able to, not would I expect it, to offer up some sort of unifying solution here. I think the real challenge is to get advertisers to think about the benefits of really planning ad buys and ad placement and not just defaulting to choosing a group of silos to push content into. Also keep in mind that most of the logic engines behind contextual advertising still haven't been tweaked enough to avoid the sometime hysterical/horrifying ad/story combinations that result. The article wasn't too long and it brought up some excellent points for media planning. However, there are still a number of moving parts that need to be addressed further before the industry can really act upon a lot of these insights.