We are living in a time of rapid change in the interactive media business. CPMs are down and business are suffering. Some will likely not survive and other will learn to adapt and thrive. For some of us who have been in this business since the 90’s – we’ve seen this before. I can vividly remember helping tier one publishers (NYTimes, WSJ, Time, etc.) in 2000 migrate their content (archive articles, etc.) and applications (crossword puzzles, etc.) online alongside paid business models (subscriptions, pay-per-view) in the wake of a challenging online advertising business model. My experience suggests that the pendulum swings both ways and given time the past does repeat itself. In other words, I am optimistic that a robust online ad market will come back, over time.
My humble advice to content owners on the Web is to continue to cost-effectively produce unique and great “keyword-targeted” content / applications for your respective target audiences. However, at the same time acquire smart and usable data about your target audience. This will continue to become more valuable over time. I remain surprised how little this happens today.
What data should be acquired and why?
Explicit Data is the most common data acquired and used by media companies about their audiences. This is typically the information acquired during a registration process (name, email, date of birth, interests, etc.) Acquiring this data in an appropriate way is important, yet many folks acquire too much early on in the customer acquisition process, and do not effectively create refresh and retention strategies through the use of this data. More worrisome to me, and a BIG downside to explicit data – some of it becomes immediately dated, or better said, “unusable the moment it was acquired.” For example, a new user registering at a content/social site is asked about their interests. This user checkes “I like Tennis” and that information is recoded and stored in the database. A few weeks later the user has a knee injury, and slowly falls out of love with tennis. Unfortunately, marketers for the media company continue to craft their strategies around this users interest in tennis. This is a growing issue as the recency of explicit data acquired is not factored into many marketing tactics.
Implicit Data is the data your customers tell you about their experiences online/mobile/etc., without being asked. For me, this is one of the beautiful secret sauces of the web as a media distribution channel. Customers tell you exactly what they like “today” (which can be different and traceable tomorrow) and more importantly, what they actually use by every click they make. Some examples of implicit data include click stream data, time spent, entry points, etc. Online marketers and technologists that use implicit data (alongside key explicit data) to their advantage will greatly benefit. While developing the new ThirdAge.com platform my team built tools to capitalize on implicit data for display ads, newsletter content, site content, etc. All very helpful tools that work. Using the example above of the consumer who explicitly relayed an interest in Tennis (then changed their mind)- incorrect data about their “not so” interest in Tennis would not be an issue in the world of effectively tracked implicit data. Reason being, that user would only remain categorized by the site as “interested in Tennis” if they consistently clicked and spent time reviewing Tennis content, thus showing recent and frequent interest there.
Ad Networks, Portals, large customer database companies, and top consumer destinations are the entities that typically spend time and resources thinking carefully about customer data, although I’ve spoken with some C-level folks from some of these companies and have been rather underwhelmed with their thinking here. My challenge to my interactive media colleagues (from big and small interactive media companies) is not to rely on others to craft your data strategy, rather be proactive and craft that yourself.
A good example of companies using customer data to aggregate targeted online audiences and garner higher CPMs is the Ad network. Use the interactive Women’s vertical (Glam, Everydayhealth, iVillage, Sheknows, etc.,) since 2005 this aggregation of targeted users generates a huge amount of monthly uniques and Glam has created an interesting Ad Network model around this. Although they no longer guarantee CPMs to smaller publishers, they are successful (now roughly 61 million monthly uniques) at bringing together many smaller women’s-focused sites into a larger target audience for marketers. The result is targeted active users for marketers willing to pay higher CPMs.
