http://www.digiday.com/stories/the-grp-is-winning/

The call by marketers, agencies and media companies alike to move beyond the banner ad is not new but essentially gone unanswered.   Social Media has evolved not as a solution to the above challenge but an alternative.  As such if media companies want to sell beyond the banner they need to offer something other than banner ad placements.

While social media has been embraced by all integration with paid display usually lives on the landing page or the occasional “like” button built into the ad.  The opportunity for integrating social into display media however should not live within the banner ad but in the design and layout offered by the media companies in the form of a Social Brand Channel.

The reason the banner ad lives primarily in the form of 728x90 and 300x250 ad slots is due to efficiency of deployment.   The complex delivery system of ad servers working across networks, publisher sites and agencies has settled into a necessary system of scale but resulted in significant commoditization of the space.

Ad servers are actually content servers and as such can deliver virtually any form of media from YouTube videos, Flick’r photo galleries, Twitter conversation feeds, blog RSS feeds and Facebook conversation streams.  Any number of these assets can easily be formatted into a social media brand channel of assets on a media publisher’s website and synchronized with the primary branding elements of a banner ad.  Most social media feeds can easily be modified to fit a 300x250 width without any sort of creative expense or development.

The standard 300x250 wide column on most websites creates a clear opportunity to blend branding and social media based content into a Social Brand Channel offering consumers greater opportunities of engagement and entertainment with the brand.  For marketers, this allows their deployments to push social media content into branded environment creating greater opportunities for engagement with consumers.

Media companies in particular benefit as they can now sell the full column length at a higher CPM reducing reliance on low CPM ad networks.  This move allows everyone to focus on the page view vs. the ad impression to measure delivery and while offering a greater number of engagement points that can be measured through social media tools in conjunction with standard media and web analytics.

From where I stand, if media companies moved towards offering Social Brand Channels as their primary media offering, it would create a #Winning scenario for all.

For starters media companies have been hammered by shrinking media budgets and fragmented audiences whose undivided attention has spread across a number of screens and portable devices.  The evolution of online media space has been commoditized below any level to support operational revenue needs and for many the very future of their existence is questionable at best. 

As your campaign launches the Facebook system automatically begins to auto-optimize out sub-segments, which are non-performing from a CTR perspective quickly whittling away delivery and reach of the broader audience.  Conversely the frequency can greatly increase on a daily level well beyond the desired level you might be looking to achieve for the remaining target audience. 

The capabilities do not exist to really drill down and see what is happening with these sub-segments when using the Facebook self managed tool, which leaves media buyers somewhat blind to what is actually happening.  Facebook reps have said that the auto-optimization of the system is specific to CPC campaigns and for reach strategies a CPM buy is more appropriate. 

When it comes to CPM campaigns however response rates are often far below CPC campaigns and ultimately drive advertisers to question the performance results.  (Welcome to the world of brand advertising and DR metrics)  The end result is that if you are calculating online GRPs or have reach and frequency goals it is best to not utilize Facebook or other such low cost social networking ad formats as part of your reach and frequency calculation.

Along the way I have stumbled across an unfortunate conclusions: active and engaged audiences are great for publishers in terms of generating ad space but not so good for advertisers looking for direct response or engagement with their ads. 

Online marketing and digital support services provided by local agencies for local business are often extremely difficult to scale at a profitable level.  The demands of digital require a wide range of resources and knowledge to effectively implement which exceed both what a local business can pay for or a small local agency can staff. 

The emergence of self managed tools such as Google AdWords and turn key solutions such as Groupon, Living Social and FourSquare deliver out of the box marketing solutions which are relatively simple for the small business owner to deploy.  Facebook and Twitter provide the ability to push content and conversations without the need to invest heavily in media and simple website platforms such as SquareSpace.com allow for the creation of low cost and easy to manage websites. 

These tools are opening doors for the local business owners to self manage their online marketing needs without the aid of a local agency.  Even when a local agency introduces programs to manage such platforms it is not long before the business owner learns enough to then ownership of these programs over. 

Proper management and deployment of robust sites supported by paid media, ad serving and web analytics require a significant work effort with work hours that are non-recoverable.  For example a $100k campaign at 15% (providing a local advertiser would pay this) would yield only $15,000, which seems like a decent amount of money.  However the agency needs to supply not just the media buying capabilities but ad serving support, analytics analysis, reporting, optimization, website management and of course engage in the reconciliation process which is often more time consuming compared to traditional. 

Digital media buyers who offer the level of skill set to deploy and manage do not come cheap for a local agency and at $15k these fees are quickly eaten up.  A local budget of $50k with only $7,500 in fees becomes a significant money loser for the agency long before the campaign ends. 

The local agency model is not necessarily in danger of disappearing altogether since there is always the opportunity to integrate a broader range of services with a limited digital offering.   But when given a choice between local turnkey solutions vs. the complexity of large-scale traditional digital deployments the choice for the local business owners is likely to lean towards the turnkey solution.

As your campaign launches the Facebook system automatically begins to auto-optimize out sub-segments, which are non-performing from a CTR perspective quickly whittling away delivery and reach of the broader audience.  Conversely the frequency can greatly increase on a daily level well beyond the desired level you might be looking to achieve for the remaining target audience. 

Over the years one of the primary issues in utilizing Rich Media providers such as Pointroll, Eyewonder and Eyeblaster is the necessity to manually merge performance data between the provider and Dart for Advertisers.  Hence, for many media campaigns it often made sense to default to Dart’s MOTIF. 

However I was please to learn today that Pointroll is now able to push performance data into Dart for Advertisers through Dart’s open API.  However Dart does not typically offer this up as a solution and will not take requests directly from Pointroll but directly from the agency or client. 

I am assuming that this is probably possible with Eyewonder and Eyeblaster as well though I have honestly not looked into yet.