Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas examines the evolving role of networks in today's marketing plans.

Do you remember your first online media buys? I know it isn’t the same as your first kiss, your first hang-over, or the first time you made a sale. But for me, at a time when almost no one was doing online advertising, making those first buys was fun, fascinating and memorable.
 
One of the earliest vendors of online advertising inventory I had the pleasure of dealing with was DoubleClick. Some of you may recall that, back in the day, after they became an independent entity in 1996 (remember when it was still part of Poppe Tyson, the subsidiary of Bozell?), DoubleClick not only provided ad serving services for publishers, but also ran an advertising network. One could run advertising across a variety of sites, and could target that advertising according to a variety of criteria. I remember targeting banners for the Union Bank of California’s online banking software product (when special software was needed for online banking) by geography and operating system (a Mac OS, it was).

Since that time, I have planned and bought advertising using networks innumerable times.

They worked not unlike the newspaper networks that had preceded them, like the Sunflower Group or the Newspaper National Network (NNN). You could buy dozens, even hundreds, of properties through the issuance of a single insertion order and with a single set of traffic instructions and ad materials.

The network provided, for the most part, quick and efficient execution.

When they are asked to put together plans in a matter of hours, with clients want buys “yesterday” and they want them cheap, some of the media that buyers and planners often look at can be found among online ad networks.

What is a Network these days?

Online ad networks have changed over the years as the industry itself has changed, but for the most part, their basic structure and nature is the same.

Some networks are really more like the rep firms of the traditional model, selling individual properties that have commercial viability but simply do not, or cannot, allocate their own resources to the project of ad sales. Winstar Interactive is representative of this kind of “network.”

But this is less and less common anymore, with larger publishers -- or sites owned by larger media companies -- finally beginning to understand that online advertising DOES have a future and so is worth getting behind. The common network today is a collective of small-to-medium tier websites that have saleable potential but are not necessarily capable of being sold on a stand-alone basis.

Some networks even act as third-party resellers of distressed inventory for much larger, tier-one sites. This may come as a surprise, but sites like Yahoo! don’t sell every last impression through their own staff. You won’t be able to ask specifically for this kind of inventory, but it is possible to get it if the inventory falls under your particular category of need.

Network Uses

Networks can be used in a lot of different ways, but one of their applications is to extend incremental reach and act as “fill” for a schedule.

The kind of reach I’m talking about, however, isn’t simply demographic reach, though this would also be a natural result. I’m talking about working to extend psychographic reach. Networks can essentially play the role of what I like to call “psychographic spot fill” to an overall online media campaign.

It’s no secret that most of the advertising dollars either go to search or it goes to the top ten properties: sites like Yahoo!, AOL and MSN. Certainly this is in no small part a function of these sites being more expensive than most others, but also, this is where much of the online universe, at one time or another, finds itself.

Something to note, however, is that the popularity of a media property based on a cumulative national audience can be misleading. Sometimes an advertiser may have a national message meant for a national audience, but that audience isn’t always found all in the same place. What I mean is that maybe there are a lot more people coming to that big, well-branding site from California and New York, but not at all from Chicago.

This is the case for national network television, and most national advertisers’ buying strategies reflect this by rounding out their television schedule with spot TV.  "Desperate Housewives" may have played really well with demographics in the San Francisco market, but that does not mean those same demographics will be equally as well served in Dallas. Because of this, one buys spot fill, which means buying local TV on local channels, in local programming (either syndication or local in origin) in Dallas to shore up communication delivery against a certain demographic audience that isn’t being reached to the same degree in one geographic center as another, even if the buy is a national buy.

Now apply this same thinking to online buying, only turn the idea at an angle reflecting behavior rather than geography.

If I’m selling cars, or video games -- just about any product -- there are certainly audiences of interested people that can be found in relevant areas of a Yahoo! or an AOL, but there are some people that can be identified behaviorally (psychographic) that aren’t found at those places with any regularity. They are instead to be found in the nooks and crannies of the world wide web. These people don’t live at MSN or Yahoo! or Google, they just visit those places. The places many people live are smaller sites that indulge an interest or an enthusiasm. They are “passion places” where the amount of time spent is longer, the experience more meaningful, and where an advertiser’s message has the chance of picking up more cache with the audience.

Buying big sites like Yahoo!, AOL and her subsidiaries, and other tier-one branded media properties is the right thing to do. But there are other ways to reach an audience that can be just as effective, maybe more so, with more sublime media. People working in this industry more than a lot of senior people in marketing that we are highly fragmented, multi-media consumers. We talk often about the role the internet can play in this embarrassment of niches. Yet by and large agencies and their clients buy the same big sites with numbing repetition.

Applying the concept of psychographic spot fill to your media plans is an exceptional way to maximize communicative value. Networks are one of the best media devices to use to accomplish this. They have a significant role to play in caulking the cracks and grooves in the mosaic of most media plans.

Jim Meskauskas is media strategies editor for iMedia Connection.