Wednesday, September 22, 2021

 


I'm officially pre-launching my new personal website dedicated to the ski lifestyle.  Please visit my new site SkiCritics to read in depth reviews of top ski resorts across the West, dig into equipment reviews, and discover the best ski cars, wagons and SUV's for getting you up to the mountains in style. 

Please let me know if you're a professional web producer for the Wordpress platform and I will be adding resources to my team to help grow, promote and contribute to my new favorite project.

Share my site on social media when you have a moment.

Cheers

Chris

Thursday, July 8, 2021

Will Google Sit Idle on Privacy for 2 Years? - No I Don't Think So


The recent news of Google delaying the depreciation of 3rd Party Cookies may be a party we should put on hold for a few months.  The industry seems giddy with relief and a sense of business as usual.  Some thought leaders like Paul Bannister have suggested we should keep the pedal to the metal and build sustainable, privacy respecting ecosystems, regardless of this short term news cycle.  I agree whole heartedly.

Please keep in mind - Google is in a tough spot with Anti-Trust, their advertising partners, and publishers alike.  If they stop moving forward on privacy policies they could get a backlash from privacy regulators and be called out as being hypocritical.

So, what will be next? 

The short answer is "we will find out soon enough"

The longer answer is lies what other levers does Google / Chrome have to increase user privacy, and sustain their stronghold on the ads business.   Apple has recently announced the upcoming elimination of IP address use on Safari, perhaps Chrome will do the same?  Also, like Safari, Google could shorten the window of expiration to 1 day or 1 week.  Further, Google / Chrome may decide to take action to eliminate or curtail UID development while things get sorted on the 3P Cookies.  Finally, let's not forget about Android, and Google can follow suit to the iOS 14.5 release privacy measures.

Google has stated that they want to eliminate all 3rd Party Data Collection and Usage, along with the tactics including fingerprinting and UID  / permanent ID's.  This greatly benefits Google, and the consumer to some extent.  

Let's dig into the consumer here a bit.  I believe, and recent data on iOS 14.5 suggest that users want to keep their data private, when asked.  What is not being asked to consumers is... "do you still want a free and open internet?"  If publishers and advertisers lose their basic economics of running a business, then publishing will consolidate to the most tech savvy and lucrative margin pub businesses.  High quality reporting, video creation, editorial, and analysis takes enormous resources.  

As a consumer, publisher, ad tech guy I believe that result based advertising which google practically invented with paid search is essential to the fabric of the open and free web.  Personally I feel comfortable with being targeted with relevant ads, re-targeted on products I've shopped for, etc.  There are many ways to enable ad targeting and attribution without so much data leakage.  In this case look at InfoSum and their methods on data matching and privacy united.

It's still clear that publisher 1st Party Data will stand the test of time (5 years or more), and worth while pursuing at scale.  The main issue will be data unification, validation, and attribution.  These are solvable problems even with privacy at the forefront.

I'm sure we'll see a headline before Q4 stating what Google is going to do instead of deprecating cookies in the new year.... It will be interesting to see how they proceed from here




Thursday, April 29, 2021

Are We At The End of The Open and Free Internet?

 With all of the changes taking place under the broad umbrella of "Data Privacy" are we at the end of the open and free internet?  Let's examine what is an open and free internet.

Open and Free implies that a user can access all data, content, information, and experiences as they deem safe, interesting, and engaging without a direct cost.  For many good, and some bad reasons this state is not what it was 20 years ago.  

Large and powerful gatekeepers have emerged including Apple, Google, ISP's, Twitter and Facebook who very much curate what we see, and how we engage with the web.  Beyond the core, brands, agencies, and ad tech companies further curate the web by blacklisting ad placements which are out of "brand safety" parameters on where they spend their ad dollars, hampering growth of more fringe websites and apps. 

Many of the advancements are quite good, protecting the public from dangerous scams, inappropriate content, hate, violence, and disinformation.  We can all admit more needs to be done to protect consumers from Fake News as this may be the most dangerous element of the open web going forward.

Today is a new era where Apple and Google are deliberately reshaping the nature of an open and free internet to specifically advance their own revenues vs. advancing the interests of an open and free web.  Many will see this as "the end", but perhaps it's just a new beginning.  

My assumption is that Google and Apple's moves to curtail open advertising systems that feed publisher revenues will have a profound impact on where we go from here.  Will new competition emerge and will the web become more fragmented.  Let's look at the basics of the gatekeepers and where they have power over the ecosystem:

Apple and Google both control the primary landscape on code and where all the rules derive from hardware, to operating systems, app stores, and browsers.  Google also controls the world search engine on how all content is discovered.  We have all observed the verticalization of technology and have celebrated this in the financial markets with stock prices soaring at each new wall built.  

Will this lead to new competition?  If so, who and how will competition begin to define and reshape "the open web" with new innovations.  There are new browsers like Brave, and Firefox, but they are still written on top of Chromium, and rely exclusively on Google Search.  Good, but certainly not independent.

I believe that it's time for a new search engine, new mobile OS / App Stores, and browser to enter the market, perhaps several with a specific slant.  Brave has taken the path to privacy and ad blocking by default, which will appeal to a certain audience, but what about building ecosystems that are appropriate for kids, subscription sites / apps, ad supported websites (free), shopping, social media, edgy content for those that dare, Anti-Fake News, etc.  Will we choose our web experiences more specifically by which browser or app store we engage with?

Hopefully we will see new competition, and I also hope this stems from innovation here in the US vs. other regions of the world.  That said, this innovation is likely to come from China, India, or Europe.  Can a big US device maker like Dell or Microsoft step up and compete with a mobile device with their own store?  or perhaps a new start up?

It's time for innovation to compete with Google and Apple !! 


Friday, April 16, 2021

Will Ad Inventory Become Verticalized from DSP - SSP - Pubs

Constant change has been the state of the digital media landscape since the inception, but will constant change come to an abrupt halt?  Would the verticalization of ad tech and publishing stabilize the industry and make for a more perfect ads world?

I think so.  

Today, supply path routing of an ad impression is complex and messy.  Single publishers often have 4-6 SSP partners and or Native Ad Network partners.  Often the Native Ad Networks re-list the inventory on other SSP's, and there is still an old practice of shared inventory among SSP's leading to a single domain being spread across most all SSP's.  This is not efficient for the publisher or the buyer.

In addition buyers will utilize 3+ DSP's, plus proprietary inventory like Facebook.  This has consolidated, but it still complicates the sprawl of ad tech.

This has lead to massive inefficiencies and impression fraud that is still running out of control today.  "what is the true origin of an ad impression?".  Ads.txt is a lightweight and easy to spoof technique which is not well suited to tackle the problems stemming from above.  Worse yet the added tax of IVT vendors like MOAT, IAS, DV, WhiteOps, Fraudlogiq triple charge the industry and have a high degree of errors leading to more inefficiency.

I believe that Google and Apple's "privacy" (aka land-grab) efforts will force change as it relates to how data flows across the ecosystem going forward. This is discussed in my last blog post covering Data Privacy. Here is how I see further consolidation of ad tech and publishing going forward.

DSP's and SSP's should merge into one product, eliminating any ambiguity of impression origin for the buyer.  Direct line of impression custody.  This will also enable, in some cases, SSP's to combine and build audience and contextual segments in conjunction with publishers 1st Party data.  Very efficient for buyers at the aggregated vs individual publisher level.

Further, there could be a world where either ad tech or publishers buy their own vertical.  To an extent, facebook has done this with liverail, and Comcast has done this with Freewheel.  If you have a large enough O&O footprint of high quality ad supply coupled with high quality 1st party data, why would you allow others to arbitrage your publisher earnings as they do today?  Wouldn't it be more valuable for the publisher to sell their own inventory directly through a UI where a buyer could come and select audience, context, and other buying rules directly with you in an automated fashion.  Since FLoC and Apple will eliminate the notion of frequency caps across 3rd party, why do you need an unified buying system to extract value?

Publishers should really begin conversations, corp dev, and design plans to aggregate all of their O&O in one unified stack.  This will eliminate the 50%-70% ad tech tax currently charged to the industry.  Yes this will take more human hands on the keyboards at the agencies, or agencies will need to be good at unifying publisher API's to automatically aggregate data for their purposes.

I believe that publishers, agencies, and brands would greatly benefit from this type of vertical consolidation going forward.  Less ad tech tax, better quality supply, access to high value 1P data.

#chrisverzello

 

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

How Data Privacy Regulations , Privacy Browsers and iOS Change Publishing Going Forward

Being in Digital Media we have become accustomed to an annual shift of the winds into a new trend.  Over the years we experienced the evolution of ad networks, then cookie re-targeting, cookie behavioral targeting, programmatic, multi-touch attribution, mobile, ad fraud mitigation, video, CTV, and now Privacy.  

Each shift in digital media has always created both pain and new business opportunity.  Often these changes have required massive tech investment across the spectrum from publishers to ad tech and ad agencies.  Most all of these changes have been somewhat unfavorable to web / app publishers diminishing their ability to capture most of the ad spend.

For a publisher, at the end of the day, capturing ad spend is the most important element of running their ads business.  Publishers sell direct, open exchange, custom packages, 1st Party Data and through resellers.  All of these are expensive tactics for a publisher to run.

I estimate that publishers only get about 10 cents on the dollar from a brand.  Let's visit how a dollar flows from a brand to a publisher:

  • Ad Agency - Media Strategy, Account Strategy, Brand Strategy, Media Mix Fees
  • Ad Agency - Media Buying Flat Fee Services 
  • Ad Agency - Programmatic trading desk fee flat or arbitrage
  • Ad Agency - GAM Ad Serving and Analytics
  • DSP Fees
  • DSP Data Fees or Agency Data Fees
  • Loss to Publisher as buyer finds a way to buy the impression at the lowest available price
  • SSP Fees
  • IVT / Viewability Fees (Agency, DSP, SSP, and Publishers all pay separately for each impression)
  • IVT / Viewability Hidden Fees of Lost Ad Impressions due to incorrect scoring of an impression
  • Ad Serving Fee
  • Ad Serving Time out / broken creative / VPAID errors / etc
  • Publisher Sales Operations Team
  • Malware service to ensure ads are safe to users
  • Consent Management Platform
  • Legal Fees 
  • Ad Product Team to keep up on tech changes
  • Sales Team - Salary + Commission
  • Sales Management
By the time a major brand like Toyota or Coke takes $1,000,000 out of their media budget and applies that to the media landscape, their dollar is paying the publisher $100,000 or perhaps less.  

So, how will this shift in privacy change the math?

Now publishers will need to determine if adding a CDP / DMP to their mix is needed, if they haven't already taken the step?  Most publishers have not, but many majors have begun this process over the past 5-7 years.  

Advantages to the Publishers opting for using CDP over FLoC:
  • Less potential for media arbitrage on user level data - Plus for Publishers
  • Context and Publisher Brand Reputation mean more the the buyers
  • More Direct Deals, lowering total cost
  • IVT and Viewability are TBD - unsure how this will be impacted as these systems rely on PII
  • Selling Big Packages with time based commitments vs. Open Market or PMP limitations
  • Protecting very high value shopping or contextual proprietary data from leaking into a 3rd Party data ecosystem, forcing buyers to get your audience on your site, vs 3P cookie targeting on low cost medium.  
  • Scarcity of data targeting should result in scarcity of buying inventory / increasing CPM's for high value contextual experiences
Disadvantages of CDP over FLoC
  • Media buyers tend to go for what is easy and familiar / Google will have a huge advantage with FLoC and media buyers will adopt over higher CPM direct deals
  • Attribution will be diminished and clicks will become important again - even though a very flawed measurement method.  It will be easier for a media buyer to buy clicks from FLoC vs individual publishers
  • It's difficult and expensive to develop a strong CDP programmatic offering and will skew to larger mulit-site web properties who have the resources to pull this off
  • It will take more selling to agencies to gain traction as a publisher with 1P data
  • Agencies will question viability and ComScore / Nielson Match to target audience, vs FloC being a more trusted data source
Each publisher will need to react to this change, and some have more at stake than others.  In all this will be yet another tax on the business, except for the sites with great contextual content, shopping, reviews, concentrated interest and audience segments / high volumes.

I believe this will lead to a consolidation of websites into large ownership groups where they can aggregate 1st Party data with massive scale.  This will be the only path forward, as i see it.  Go Big or Go Home (out of business).

So, I anticipate a significant amount of M&A associated with cash rich companies seeking to buy highly contextual verticals at scale.  Some will focus on shopping, others tech, others lifestyle.  Perhaps some will diversify in all making them attractive to a multitude of brands.

#ChrisVeraello



Friday, April 26, 2013

Repost of Google's Offering in the Ad Viewability Space

Google's offering in the ad viewability space has scored third party accreditation from the Media Ratings Council.
Google joins others who have wended their way through the MRC's approval process – the respective viewability products from comScore, Double Verify and RealVu have been approved – so Google is not standing alone. But given its expansive relationship with marketers, agencies and publishers, the MRC's nod at its viewable offering is likely to spur more usage of this tool.
"Viewability is the first critical building block – no other metric matters, from a brand's perspective, if the ad wasn't seen by an actual human being," said Neal Mohan, Google's VP of display, in an interview with AdExchanger. "Anything that we build on top of that, such as brand lift, as we announced with our Google Consumer Surveys product, follows from that first step of knowing if an ad has been viewed."
Publishers are wary of the trend. Traditionally, sellers have benefitted from the mystery around what has been viewed and what hasn't. Google argues there's a silver lining in that ads "below the fold" may be undervalued. The promise of viewability is that, since more and more users find content through search or social media, the idea of placing content and their attached ads in places other than the top of the homepage means that placements that were once considered out of the way could command higher CPMs.
"Viewable impressions inherently command a much higher price," Mohan said. "By giving brand advertisers more confidence, we grow the pie, rather than trying to grab dollars from somewhere else. This is how we crack what I call the '$200 billion nut' in brand spending for online."
As a sign of how important Google values viewability, ActiveView will be more fully integrated into ad management systems for both buyers and sellers. Instead of using it for after-the-fact reporting, Google intends ActiveView to be "real-time and actionable." It will be baked natively in all of our ad platforms, into its buy-side ad servers like DoubleClick For Advertisers and its sell-side tools like DoubleClick For Publishers, and so it won't require any additional work by Google's clients on either side, Mohan said.
But how much does MRC accreditation really matter? A lot, according to Brian Hughes, SVP, Audience Analysis Practice Lead for Magna Global.
"We take MRC accreditation very seriously – it means that the methodology has been audited by a neutral third party (such as Ernst & Young or PwC) and deemed to meet the standards established by the MRC and agreed upon by industry stakeholders," he said. "Think of it as the 'Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval' for media research."
As for viewability – it’s important because it’s possible, Hughes said. "To this day, we don’t know whether TV viewers are in the room 100% of the time when an ad runs," he said. "While not foolproof, viewability in digital media allows us to at least know whether the ad was visible on screen, and we can pay for only those occurrences… The idea is to eliminate waste."
Meanwhile WPP Group's Neo@Ogilvy says the significance of viewability varies depending on the campaign goals.
For brand clients, the brand message is key, therefore viewability will continue to be a hot button, according to managing director Bradley Rogers. For direct response clients where media cost is commonly linked to a direct action, it is of lesser importance.
"The topic relies heavily on identifying consistent methodologies in which to accurately track and measure viewability in order to understand the impact on the impressions being sold," Rogers said. "With publishers already finding it difficult to create content and monetize that content, any factor that could potentially impact their profitability will likely meet with a slow adoption rate.
He added, "While agencies and clients will continue to push the agenda, Google's success in this area will be tied to this adoption curve."
Andrew Shebbeare, chief strategist at Essence Digital, was also cheered by ActiveView's accreditation. Still Essence, hasn't been all that focused on external accreditation to date; the company's been using viewability as a diagnostic metric more than a buying filter. But as the notion of viewability as a metric to buy against gains traction, he expects Essence's stance will change accordingly.
"As I've said before [on AdExchanger], I'd love to see viewability metrics available from ad servers at the impression log level," Shebbeare said. "It feels like Google is paving the way to impression-level viewability within the same measurement context as conversions and exposure will make our brand lift and attribution models considerably more powerful -- leading to better, faster decisions."
Google's analysis of the strong correlation between viewability and clickthrough rates is interesting, Shebbeare adds. In particular, he agrees with the idea that viewability can demonstrate "gold below the fold" -- a reminder that simply being at the top of a page can no longer be equated with viewability.
"It's hard to make fair comparisons since buying ads often carries a tradeoff between placement and targeting, which itself might entail a trade-off between viewability and CTR," Shebbeare said. "For example retargeting ads will generally have higher CTRs but might be less viewable on average than "premium" ads - it's hard to compare fairly. We find one of the more interesting relationships to be the one between viewability and brand lift. Here we repeatedly see powerful correlations -- so much so that viewability has become a proven first-pass optimization metric for brand campaigns."

Monday, September 17, 2012

Re-Post / That's Progress

That's Progress! More Fake Reviews Coming

            
It can’t have been long after the first cavemen offered up grunts of approval or disapproval that someone had the bright idea of paying for good reviews. It’s cheap, it’s efficient, and best of all: it’s dishonest! Sure you’re basically lying to consumers, but tricking the gullible is half the fun, isn’t it? Movie marketers have elevated the fake review to an art form.
Needless to say, social media has taken the fake review phenomenon to the next level. According to a report from Gartner titled “The Consequences of Fake Fans, ‘Likes’ and Reviews on Social Networks,” “enterprise spending on paid social media ratings and reviews” (that’s a nice way of saying “fake reviews”) will increase over the next few years: by 2014, the research outfit predicts that 10%-15% of all online reviews will be fake.
Jenny Sussin, a senior research analyst at Gartner, stated: “Many marketers have turned to paying for positive reviews with cash, coupons and promotions including additional hits on YouTube videos in order to pique site visitors' interests in the hope of increasing sales, customer loyalty and customer advocacy through social media ‘word of mouth’ campaigns.”
There are, of course, some legal questions which arise when marketers hire people to pose as ordinary, unpaid reviewers. Gartner also predicts that at least a handful of Fortune 500 brands will probably run afoul of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission by 2014. The FTC decided back in 2009 that paying for positive reviews without disclosure constituted deceptive advertising, which can be punished with fines.
In August 2011 I wrote about software created by four Cornell students to identify fake online hotel reviews. The students described their efforts to combat “opinion spam” in a report titled “Finding Deceptive Opinion Spam by Any Stretch of the Imagination.” Overall, the Cornellians claimed their software is able to spot fake reviews 90% of the time, versus just 50% for human subjects, focusing on fake positive reviews and irrelevant comments which, say, post links to other Web sites for promotional purposes. With this focus in mind, the authors said roughly half of all online hotel reviews are fake -- four times the proportion guessed by human subjects (who estimated fake reviews as 12% of all reviews).


Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/183209/thats-progress-more-fake-reviews-coming.html?edition=51252#ixzz26lVUa3lg

My Comments:  Chris Verzello

Having spent 3 years @ Technorati in the early years of blog marketing, it was always very apparent that positive posts were "For Sale".  Izea, formerly Pay Per Post was at the top of the heap, when it came to a straight transaction payola and media coverage.

The whole reason blogs became important in the first place, was the bias reporting of Fox, and other pro RNC publications / media companies, who essentially moved the White House agenda forward, making it "fact" through the media channels.  Blogs like Huffpo became famous by offering an independent voice to the media channels.  Trust was formed with independent journalists / bloggers & readers.  Now, this is the biggest sham.  Seems like brand dollars have the most influence, and the independent journalist is just a voice for hire... What a shame on bloggers. 

I have never really believed in paid blogger outreach, and feel that is has corrupted what was once pure.  Shame on all those blogger who "whore themselves out" for a few bucks.  I think the going rate is around $5-20 per paid post.  Not a lot of money to sell our for...