Posted by: Matt Shanahan In audience selling, a publisher sells impressions of a specific target audience to an advertiser.  In audience reselling, a publisher sells the audience data to an advertiser via an aggregator or network.  The decision to sell the data vs. the impression should be based on a financial model and expected returns.  Interestingly, I haven’t found any models that help publishers make this decision.  So here is my take. Using the math set forth by GCA Savvian, data aggregators on average get $0.50 of every $10 CPM, and publishers receive $3.60 of every $10 CPM.  Let’s assume group of advertisers wants to buy 1,000,000 impressions ($10,000) to a specific audience demographic.  Let’s assume there is a publisher [...]

Posted by: Matt Shanahan In addition to producing media, publishers also produce audiences.  It is the combined uniqueness of the media and audience that are the source of revenue in their models.  Unfortunately, that uniqueness is being systematically eroded and has largely been overlooked. Here’s why. Uniqueness of a product is critical characteristic if a supplier wants control over pricing.  Look at the recent iPad offering as an example of where great margins are being earned due to the uniqueness of the offering.  As competition enters, we’ll see the price of tablets drop dramatically. As discussed in this blog, publishers are selling audiences — audiences generated from their media.  In audience selling, uniqueness is derived from the targeting data a [...]

Posted by: Matt Shanahan In the upcoming posts, I’ll look into the impact data aggregators (pure-play and ad networks) have on publishers.  Do data aggregators provide bi-directional transparency?  What are the implication of transparency?  What are the issues associated with attribution of data sources?  What realistic contribution margin can selling data have to the bottom line of a publisher?  Data aggregators have been a big force behind the movement to audience buying.  For the most part, they are the ones doing the audience selling, or reselling as it were.  Essentially, they aggregate audience members from publishers and then repackage and resell them.  Their goal is to build a big enough audience (i.e., pool of cookies annotated with rich information) for sale to [...]

Posted by: Matt Shanahan While intent brings display advertising closer to search advertising, it is firmographic and demographic data that makes targeting more accurate.  In search advertising, the advertiser buys keywords but is unable to specify the audience.  For example, when I entered “Cabo San Lucas” for a search, a whole bunch of travel ads popped up on the right hand side.  Looking through them, the ads were irrelevant because they didn’t come close to my demographics.  The ads made no distinction to whether I was a spring-break student, a retiree, or otherwise. Demographic and firmographic data can take intent further by better matching advertisers and audience members.  Rather than an advertiser buying all the intent regardless of the audience, [...]

Posted by: Matt Shanahan In the previous post, I looked into the importance of reach and frequency data.  Now I’ll focus on intent data as a means for improving ad targeting.  This week, the IAB announced that Q1 had $5.9B in online advertising.  comScore also announced that Q1 had $2.7B in display advertising.  And while display advertising delivers more 95% of the impressions, it garners less than 50% of the revenue because of targeting.  Using intent data, display advertising can become more like search advertising in performance and consequently revenue.  Intent is the basis for target quality in search advertising.  When 80% of searches performed are informational in nature, ads can be served to answer the question for the users.  [...]

Posted by: Matt Shanahan At last week’s eMetrics conference, I talked with Jonathan Mendez about the disconnect between advertisers and agencies desire for “audience buying” and the lack of publishers providing “audience selling.”  It looks like it struck a chord.  He wrote about it in AdExchanger today.