Digital ad targetability is at an all-time high. With every buy that includes hyper-targeted inventory to niche audiences, we have to ask ourselves who is minding the store.
That is, we can negotiate terrifically with our ad sales reps for a slice of inventory that reaches just the right people. But without some sort of buy integrity check in place, how would we ever know the difference if our ads somehow ran untargeted?
There are unscrupulous ad networks in the marketplace that will do this to unsuspecting advertisers. But even if we did business exclusively with trusted networks with established track records, there's a quirky business dynamic at work that can result in your digital advertising running with incorrect targeting parameters applied. It's important to understand how this works.
Back in the old days, many ad sales reps had direct access to inventory systems and would input their own buys. So if a rep sold Widgets Unlimited a package of 10 million impressions reaching the San Francisco DMA, that rep would input the buy directly into the ad management system and ensure the advertiser got what it requested. These days, few ad sales reps put their own buys in. They have teams of ad operations professionals who do this for them, so they can spend more time selling and handling customer service and less time monkeying with the ad server.
This separation between sales and service represents a seam in the process where important details can be lost or miscommunicated. A targeting detail might be omitted and no one will know until buy performance suffers or someone notices that ads are running untargeted. In most cases with ad networks, such errors are unintentional. (There are, however, network reps who exploit this seam and use it to provide plausible deniability in the case that they're caught passing off ROS as targeted inventory.)
None of this should be reassuring to you if you're an advertiser. It's downright scary. You or your agency should be conducting buy integrity checks as soon as campaigns go live.
There are three important components to a buy integrity check that can pick up on trafficking errors for targeted ads. The first is a report from the selling organization that provides screenshots of the ads running, along with a report that shows your ads were entered into the ad server as bought. Request these if you're not doing it already.
The second is a manual check. It's important to note that not every targeted buy can be checked manually. For instance, if I'm targeting ads to a particular group of ZIP codes and I'm in the target geography, I should be able to see the ads and can thus run a manual check. If, however, I'm targeting ads to people who have indicated in a survey that they suffer from a particular medical condition, I can't check up on those ads unless I take the survey and indicate I have the condition. In an Excel spreadsheet, I'll separate line items of a media buy into two buckets -- things that can be checked and things that can't. Then I'll run checks on anything I can.
The third is relying on external data. External research vendors can give an indication whether or not your campaign is reaching the intended audience. For instance, survey vendors like Dynamic Logic or Factor TG can ask qualifying questions on their surveys. See a lot of "out of target" responses to surveys coming back? Then something is wrong with the targeting and needs to be corrected. (You also need to negotiate a make-good.)
Other research companies like comScore can provide some data indicating whether or not your campaign is hitting its mark, based on matching those exposed to your campaign with a panel and making sure the demography matches up. It's important to pay attention to survey and panel data in the early days of a campaign in order to make sure your campaign is targeted correctly.
Like so many other things in this business, though, the process of running buys and checking them is a technological cat-and-mouse game. The problem won't go away until selling organizations more closely align their incentives to sales reps and ad operations people with the notion of running accurately targeted buys. In the meantime, we need to be diligent about checking the accuracy of our ad buys.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.
On Twitter? Follow Tom at @THespos1 or @_MarketingLLC. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.
