When someone mentions “digital media optimization”, what do you think of? An A/B creative test? The advanced algorithms that make one ad network better than another? Pulling a report halfway through a campaign, calling publisher partners, and sending faxes to reallocate to better performing sites/placements?
Almost all digital media campaigns involve some element of optimization, and in the next 2-3 years optimization will become more pervasive, more rapid, and more automated. Digital media planners and account managers will still have control over their campaigns, but they’ll spend more time considering strategic issues and less time calculating and comparing the ROI of different media options.
It’s hard to say who’s going to be the leader in the optimization space: media holding company ventures like Havas’ AdNetik, Vivaki Nerve Center, and Varick Media Management; dynamic creative services like Tumri, Adisn, and SnapAds; ad networks like Turn, Tribal Fusion, and X+1; or buy-side solutions like InviteMedia and Media Math. The list goes on and on. There are a lot of players who increase advertising performance by optimizing better than the next guy. But when I think about Optimization, here are the three pillars that I use to frame the issue:
1. Audience
2. Media
3. Creative
Audience:
This the individual consumer that you are reaching with the ad. These are the traits that would be relevant to optimization:
A) Demographic profile (age, gender, DMA, HHI, education, etc.)
B) Data from previous ad interactions (first impression vs. third impression, previous visits to campaign landing page, previous visits to advertiser homepage)
C) Data from transactions with brand (current customer vs. acquisition prospect, customer data from client CRM database)
Media:
This is the environment in which you are presenting the ad. These are the traits that would be relevant to optimization:
A) Media property (Major media brand vs. long-tail site, blog vs. social network vs. editorial site)
B) Page placement (Above the fold vs. below the fold)
C) Context (If a semantic engine scanned the page, how would it classify the content?)
3. Creative
A) Format (Standard flash vs. rich media vs. video)
B) Creative Message (What product are you promoting?)
C) Creative Details (Color of ad, call to action, intro animation, logo placement)
In my experience, media optimization is the most common but there are huge gains to be had by optimizing all three, and even greater gains for those who optimize all three in an integrated platform.
Bottom Line: More and more of digital media will be optimized in the future. Marketers should look at the three pillars of digital advertising optimization — audience, media, and creative — and ask themselves: Which pillars am I currently optimizing? Which pillar do I understand best when it comes to controlling performance? Which pillar would benefit the most from quicker, more automated optimization?