The Pontiflex Blog

The importance of efficiencies in online advertising

October 1, 2008 at 10:26 am Arun Krishnan 1 comment

An excellent article by Adweek columnist Brian Morrissey emphasizes the importance of increasing efficiencies in online advertising. We all know how inefficient it is to buy media today – with multiple phone calls, emails, and yes the fax. (Other than the DMV, media buying might be the last bastion of the fax).

I would tell you an anecdote or two about buying – and optimizing online media – as an agency media professional, but it would only serve to increase my blood pressure, which my doctor tells me is not a good thing.

Mr. Morrissey puts a number on the ineffeciencies. In his article, he quotes David Kenny, managing partner of Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi as saying that  “it takes Publicis 44,000 employees to generate $5 billion in revenue”, and that estimates suggest that “40 percent of the work at Publicis shops takes place doing humdrum tasks”.

These inefficiencies will hamper clients from serving clients during a recession (or whatever term you prefer as a label for this current financial mess). Agency media people are already strapped for time. With so many available resources devoted to planning, buying and setting up campaigns, the focus is entirely on the campaign frontend.

As a result, they have little time to spare to correlate campaign backend marketing metrics to actual business metrics in a meaningful manner – which is of the paramount importance, especially when there is a $700 billion hole in the financial stratosphere.

In this context, the launch of Yahoo’s Platform Apt and Platform A’s ad management tool are welcome developments. Another welcome development would be the proliferation of publisher agnostic, i.e open ad management platforms. This way media planners and buyers could log on to one interface and manage all their campaigns with all their publishers – Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft and any and all legitimate publishers. Think of the efficiencies!

Google Ad Manager is an open interface for publishers, allowing them to manage all of their campaigns (even non Adsense ones). Our own Pontiflex AdLeads is open for advertisers, allowing them to buy display ads and direct response ads and run them on any publisher (albeit only on a CPL pricing model).

Do you know of any others?

Entry filed under: Best Practices, Lead Generation, Online Advertising. Tags: .