Comments on: Will Ad Verification Tools Go Away? http://digitalcmo.com/2010/05/03/will-ad-verification-tools-go-away/ @ the intersection of digital marketing and organizational leadership Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:34:04 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: diabetes diet http://digitalcmo.com/2010/05/03/will-ad-verification-tools-go-away/comment-page-1/#comment-2218 diabetes diet Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:55:04 +0000 http://digitalcmo.com/?p=331#comment-2218 Sorry, had to vent. Anyway as much as I would love to believe that skepticism and critical thinking could become mainstream, I dont see a lot of promising evidence. My roommate is a huge John Edwards fan. She even went to a show taping once and is convinced he told her sister things he couldnt have known. Then she went to a $300/hour psychic and related the experience in a way that made me – for just a moment – wonder if it could be real. But when I listened to the tape of the session it was clear that the woman was wrong at least as much as she was right and that my roommate fed her most of the main facts while the rest were merely statistic probabilities. Shes listened to that tape many times over and is just as convinced of the psychics gifts as the day she stepped out of her office (or parlor, or wherever.) Sorry, had to vent. Anyway as much as I would love to believe that skepticism and critical thinking could become mainstream, I dont see a lot of promising evidence. My roommate is a huge John Edwards fan. She even went to a show taping once and is convinced he told her sister things he couldnt have known. Then she went to a $300/hour psychic and related the experience in a way that made me – for just a moment – wonder if it could be real. But when I listened to the tape of the session it was clear that the woman was wrong at least as much as she was right and that my roommate fed her most of the main facts while the rest were merely statistic probabilities. Shes listened to that tape many times over and is just as convinced of the psychics gifts as the day she stepped out of her office (or parlor, or wherever.)

]]> By: Kirby Winfield http://digitalcmo.com/2010/05/03/will-ad-verification-tools-go-away/comment-page-1/#comment-144 Kirby Winfield Mon, 10 May 2010 20:44:56 +0000 http://digitalcmo.com/?p=331#comment-144 Harrison, You make some valid points here. I do agree that “point solutions” for verification may not create long term value for investors. Some providers have commoditized the service, and when viewed strictly as an audit tool, verification does feel more like a feature than a product. That’s why AdXpose focuses on optimization and attribution as much if not more than we do verification – we want to grow the value of all effective inventory exponentially for both publishers and advertisers. Helping the agencies and brands you mention determine the right price for an online “engagement” within an ad, for example, creates an entire new valuation for display, and analytics and metrics like this will be a key driver for the oft heralded move of brand dollars to online. However, in making your central analogy, you conveniently overlook an endemic issue in display that is largely if not entirely absent in search: fragmentation. The publisher landscape in SEM even at its most labyrinthine included only 30 or 40 players in toto. Arguably, only 10 of those mattered. Fast forward to today, and there are (generously) five SEM publishers left. The market managed to efficiency quickly because the traffic (and quality) graph was immensely top-heavy. Basically, the five publishers who mattered solved the problem. Display is a different beast. There is a $6-9B “non-premium” display market sold mostly indirectly and with little to no transparency. This does not even include the directly purchased “premium” inventory which can be inappropriately targeted as often as indirect. There are hundreds of players in the supply side ecosystem and there is blinding confusion at the agency level. Companies like ours are leading the charge to eliminate the confusion and inefficiency, in a way that allows us to be a driver of a new online economy and allows everyone to participate in the immense upside. The appropriate analogy for AdXpose, at least, may be to the site analytics firms (Omniture, Coremetrics et al.) as opposed to the Click Fraud firms. The former are focused on increasing the value of online media and growing the pie, while the latter in many cases simply sought to eliminate negative space and ended up putting themselves effectively out of business. Kirby Winfield President & CRO AdXpose Harrison,

You make some valid points here. I do agree that “point solutions” for verification may not create long term value for investors. Some providers have commoditized the service, and when viewed strictly as an audit tool, verification does feel more like a feature than a product. That’s why AdXpose focuses on optimization and attribution as much if not more than we do verification – we want to grow the value of all effective inventory exponentially for both publishers and advertisers. Helping the agencies and brands you mention determine the right price for an online “engagement” within an ad, for example, creates an entire new valuation for display, and analytics and metrics like this will be a key driver for the oft heralded move of brand dollars to online.

However, in making your central analogy, you conveniently overlook an endemic issue in display that is largely if not entirely absent in search: fragmentation. The publisher landscape in SEM even at its most labyrinthine included only 30 or 40 players in toto. Arguably, only 10 of those mattered. Fast forward to today, and there are (generously) five SEM publishers left. The market managed to efficiency quickly because the traffic (and quality) graph was immensely top-heavy. Basically, the five publishers who mattered solved the problem.

Display is a different beast. There is a $6-9B “non-premium” display market sold mostly indirectly and with little to no transparency. This does not even include the directly purchased “premium” inventory which can be inappropriately targeted as often as indirect. There are hundreds of players in the supply side ecosystem and there is blinding confusion at the agency level. Companies like ours are leading the charge to eliminate the confusion and inefficiency, in a way that allows us to be a driver of a new online economy and allows everyone to participate in the immense upside.

The appropriate analogy for AdXpose, at least, may be to the site analytics firms (Omniture, Coremetrics et al.) as opposed to the Click Fraud firms. The former are focused on increasing the value of online media and growing the pie, while the latter in many cases simply sought to eliminate negative space and ended up putting themselves effectively out of business.

Kirby Winfield
President & CRO
AdXpose

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