Go Bag July 20, 2012

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Diana

Language Is Everything

“…language can also corrupt thought.”

- Orwell

This quote could very easily be a part of our Monday Jumpstart series with how well it rings true for those of us who write in the digital space. Friend of the blog and frequent contributor Josh Mortensen uses the quote to open a blog post for his own digital home GlibHippo, a post about language we thoroughly enjoy.

Here is an excerpt:

“Two words never used in advertising or media before the rise on the Web:performance and optimize. Not Ogilvy nor Burnett nor Draper ever uttered them. Apple’s 1984, The Man in the Hathaway Shirt, Clairol’s Does she … or doesn’t she?, VW’s Think Small – none of them had their performance optimized. Brand advertising is about story telling, narrative if you prefer academic sounding jargon, not about tuning.

But in online advertising we have a stunted vocabulary. It is a language devised by engineers who have only a binary understanding of what advertising can or should do. And it is confusing. We use the language of response marketing universally to discuss both tactical and brand. But the two are mutually exclusive. Orwell would recognize this immediately. Language shapes our sense of reality.”

Form is function and language is meaning. Read the rest of Josh’s great blog post here.

Tags: digital communication, GlibHippo, internet communication, internet language, jargon, online language, orwell, removing jargon

When Data Trumps Content

Last week AdAge reported that Google has big plans for a data-exchange. This was seriously important news but two things conspired to bury it. First, there was all the Google+ hype and second, it was story about data.

I know – data? Snore. New accounting rules make for more compelling reading.

But the biggest digital advertising story you have never heard is data. Never mind mobile. Never mind video and real-time bidding. Gathering info about you as a consumer and finding ways to use that info, across different media, is the future of advertising. Everything else is just details.

From the beginning, the Web promised advertisers a utopia where they could show the right ads to exactly the right people. No more aggregated, generalized audiences, they could target individuals.

But digital advertising still does not differ significantly from the way Don Draper did business. Despite oceans of data being available, targeting and segmentation are still based on the media, not the user.

One problem is that data and content are both very fragmented. Publishers know about your habits on their site but little about your media habits as a whole.

Companies like BlueKai or AudienceScience attempt to address this by providing aggregated user surfing data.

This third party data presents an interesting challenge for content creators and publishers.

In the old days, you bought ads in GQ because you assumed readers of the magazine fit the segment you wanted. GQ got paid a premium because they aggregated that audience.

But third party data allows advertsiers to slice out audiences from different pools of traffic. Information gathered about users’ web habits, search history, their gender etc. can be used to make assumptions about the kind of ads to serve, carving out a segment independent of the publishers audience.

“Thanks New York Times but I will go find my own users on your website.”

If advertisers feel they need these data suppliers to truly aggregate the audience they want, this begs the question:

What value do publishers bring beyond raw ad impressions?

Of course the assumption is that all the data and attendant blackbox targeting actually works.

But assuming it does work as advertised – no one should be paying premium to be on a particular site.

If publishers were doing their job – cultivating audience instead of generating impressions – there would not be a serious market for third party data. But as the business is developing right now, the value of content is in danger.

Which brings us back to Google’s data-exchange. The report is they are working on a market where publishers and third-party data would be combined centrally. Advertisers could buy desired segments from a rich data set, hop on an ad exchange and bid on inventory, never considering an individual publisher’s content.

Google has already woven itself into the online advertising ecosystem in an unprecedented way: search, display, adserving, ad management etc. Becoming the arbiter of audience would be the last step in making their advertising Death Star fully operational.

Occasional contributor, Josh Mortensen first appeared on the Web in 2002, writing for Salon.com.

A version of this post first appeared in The Hippo Files.

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And so it begins

Today, a new kind of ad network came out of the closet. GlibHippo. They have been in proverbial stealth mode for the past year or so quietly accumulating customers and serving up more than five billion impressions to more than 60 million unique users per month.

They offer up something that you just don’t hear much about anymore – human intelligence combined with technology, with human intelligence doing the heavy lifting. They believe that there is more to an impression. That the real value over time is in fact a customer, and they believe this comes from what happens after the users clicks on that ad.

The company’s founders are long time industry veterans of the internet age, digital media and online movie revolution including the CEO, Arican Wegter who was one of the co-founders of LOVEFilm. They aren’t all high tech addicts basing their success for their clients on some fancy optimization machine that coughs up the magic matrix for your ad … they massage, learn and perfect your campaigns to get you the clicks you need.  I know its hard to believe, but nothing beats the human brain. Follow them on Twitter.com/glibhippo

– JLH

Tags: acquisition marketing, Ad network, Advertising, Arican Wegter, brands, Europe, GlibHippo, Maik Brodowski, online advertising