Oreos are Good, Especially The Audience Layer

Photo of an Oreo cookie on a white table.
Image via Wikipedia

Doug Weaver wrote a great piece today titled The New Oreo, Part 3: The Audience Layer.

“Anyone mildly plugged into digital advertising in 2010 can’t possibly ignore the noise and energy around audience buying.

There are many people in our industry who can go a lot deeper on this topic than I…”

I’ll attempt to take it a bit “deeper” but will do so around his 4 premises.

  1. It’s a Different Marketplace: “Audience buying is happening, and it is going to happen more”, but today, the market is not transparent. There are many companies out there that can sell your data for a price (and if not tied to media its probably much less), but what value are you getting other than a new, arguably small revenue stream? Are you learning about data strategies for your own organization? Are you learning about audience data collection, segmentation and optimization? If you’re going to invest time and effort in a new partnership, understand how the “data” company can make you smarter and affect your business in a meaningful way. One that adds long term value. Remember what ad networks did to your business?
  2. Create a Trading Desk: “Segregating and centralizing the audience selling activity inside your organization is a good idea. Keep your ‘page sellers’ focused on selling the value of placement. Let your specialists manage the relationships and requests from DSPs and interact with your optimizers.” I would take this one step further..in the opposite direction. Publisher that can take the lead and sell audiences on top of their placement should see increased CPM rates and differentiation from their competitors. If this is where the market is heading, might as well start understanding it now.
  3. Demand See-Through Tags: If a company is tagging your site, you should not only understand who pays the freight, but you should have some visibility into the actual shipment. Simply put, you are entitled for more insights other than just a paycheck.
  4. If You’re a Data Enabler, Get Paid for It: Publishers should absolutely get paid for their data, but they should work to optimize the use of that data by looking at and leveraging the individual behaviors as well as applying that data towards multiple revenue streams. Companies that can offer revenue streams for media and data, using the same data source, can help the publisher over the long haul in establishing a meaningful, multifaceted business.

(Disclosure: The post can also be found at Lotame Learnings. Lotame is my current employer)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]