ValueClick Media's general manager shares ways to use ad networks to drive brand marketing results.
Ad networks are earning an increasing share of brand marketing budgets, and rightfully so. Brand advertisers are discovering what their direct-response counterparts have known for years-- ad networks deliver results.
An increasingly fragmented online audience has led brand advertisers to look for additional methods to reach their customers and ad networks are stepping up to the challenge. The following five reasons explain this shift in attitude (and brand budgets) toward ad networks.
1. Complement your reach
An established ad network with critical mass is a perfect vehicle to extend reach beyond what the top few properties provide. There is more to the internet than just a couple of key portals and a few top vertical content sites. In fact, the very essence of the internet is about fragmented sources of content. Not to say that top portals and sites such as Yahoo! and ESPN don't offer valuable advertising opportunities, they absolutely do. It is to say, that online marketing plans must extend beyond the top few to include the many other options that exist in order to fully maximize the opportunity that the internet offers. Several established ad networks offer unduplicated, complementary reach to tens of millions of unique users, with inventory coming from unique sources through the aggregation of thousands of content rich niche sites. The quality of the sites that are working with the top ad networks has improved dramatically and most have adapted to brand requirements offering significant transparency. Furthermore, many of the niche sites within a network yield higher advertising impact as a result of less page clutter and passionate content interaction with the user. A typical consumer's "favorites" list is made up of dozens of sites that touch their lifestyles and breed loyalty.
2. Reduce frequency waste
By nature of the network model, which works with many advertisers and across thousands of sites, an ad network has the ability to control frequency across many sites on a media plan. Once optimal frequency is met, the networks' sites serve alternate impressions and frequency waste is curtailed. By contrast, compare a display advertising media plan which includes 10 sites and does not use an ad network. If the media plan is assembled using common planning tools that segment by demographic and psychographic data, there's a very good chance that the same user will visit more than one of the sites on the plan during the course of the campaign. When an agency or advertiser executes the campaign across these sites, even with the use of a third-party ad server, they run the risk of frequency waste. To illustrate this waste, let's assume that all 10 sites are running the campaign and each are able to frequency cap at three. If the same user goes to all 10 sites on the plan, he or she could be exposed 30 times to the same ad. Because the advertiser or agency is working with each site for a specific campaign, there is no way to control frequency across all sites on the plan, whereas an ad network is in a position to serve an alternative ad impression to any site on the plan.
3. Optimize to brand metrics
The ad network model is unique in its ability to drive ROI on any results metrics, as well in its ability to drive maximum scale because of the critical mass reached across so many thousands of sites. This unique expertise includes delivering on brand metrics. Common primary brand marketing objectives include driving lift in awareness, message association, brand favorability and purchase intent. Lift is typically measured by conducting ad effectiveness studies in tandem with the online media campaign. These studies are commonly conducted by companies such as Insight Express or Dynamic Logic/Millward Brown, who use traditional test and control panels in their research. By establishing campaign lift goals upfront, top ad networks can set-up campaigns to measure each brand metric independently, and allow for optimization of that particular metric across their network of sites. What's important is establishing the primary goals and the feedback loop from the ad effectiveness research results upfront. This allows the ad network to optimize placement in the areas of the network that are driving the highest lift in the brand metrics that have been predetermined as most important. These techniques are similar to those developed from direct marketing because the same principles apply. What's more, most brand marketing campaigns typically have secondary objectives related to generating leads or sales. This is where ad networks have traditionally excelled-- driving lift in awareness and purchase intent.
4. Scale your custom solutions
An ad network is simply the most scalable solution for many of the custom options that exist in online brand marketing. Scalability is the most common limitation of brand marketing executions involving rich media, advanced targeting such as behavioral, time of day, geography, and other less typical options such as roadblocks. Individual publishers typically enforce strict frequency caps on rich media executions, especially on take-over ads, thus significantly limiting their available inventory. In addition, a true behavioral targeting solution requires a significant marketplace of data (i.e., critical mass of user browsing, search, purchase intent and ad response behavior) and a user-base to leverage against to effectively re-target users based on demonstrated behavior. Targeting options such as time of day and geography tend to severely limit the available inventory on any one publisher. And while, surround-sessions exist on individual sites, roadblocks to a large internet audience for maximum impact and awareness can only be obtained through a large portal or large ad network. For example, a major Hollywood movie debut could run a roadblock on a major portal and a major ad network between the local hours of 3PM to 7PM on the Friday of opening weekend for maximum awareness from online users.
5. Leverage efficiencies
Minimizing frequency waste is just one example of efficiency benefits, found when working with an ad network. Other important examples include campaign management, optimization and pricing. When considering the effort required to plan for, negotiate pricing and manage campaign delivery and brand metric performance across many sites, advertisers and agencies will find that working with an established ad network will significantly free their time up to focus on getting the most from their portal and top vertical content site strategies as part of a balanced media mix.
The top ad networks offer a complete brand marketing solution and are fast becoming an essential component of brand advertising budgets. The leading ad networks have the experience, knowledge, and inherent technical capabilities to drive superior brand marketing results.