This Week in Relevance

This week TWIR examines the vastly different directions in which digital advertising is evolving. Will advertisers develop more relevant ads the more user data they collect or is it most effective to simply let the user choose their own ad experience? Can marketers learn more from exclusive sponsorship of highly targeted content or from users that choose not to engage with their ads? For all the progress the digital advertising community has made, it sure seems like the wild, wild, west some days.

The More You Know
Erin Jo Richey of AdAge examines the personal information digital advertisers may (or may not) know about you. The synergy of these data points and technology, enabling marketers to tailor advertisements accordingly, continues to evolve – will it drive the advertising experience – for marketers and consumers – forward? For a deeper look at privacy, the ongoing Wall Street Journal feature “What They Know” explores the spectrum of data gathering practices of some of the web’s most trafficked sites. It seems worth noting as a reminder that apart from geo targeting settings available from the publisher, the only data point available for search marketers to target against is the user search query. It poses the following question which has Digital Media 101 blue book essay written all over it: Could you create a more relevant advertising experience knowing the user bio / demo data outlined in the AdAge piece or by knowing the explicit user interest given their search query? There’s obviously quite a lot of money being thrown around trying to answer that very question.

Empowering Users to Choose their own Ads
Kristen Schweizer of the Bloomberg News examines the movement to allow users to choose the ads they see in video content. As Beth Uyenco Shatto, global research director at Microsoft’s ads unit notes, “The big ‘aha’ here is understanding what makes a viewer choose a particular ad.” It is unclear at this point how publishers will price ads that users select but by virtue of exposure being dictated by their audience, marketers are again incentivized to address ad relevancy head on. As more and more forcing mechanisms are put in place for marketers to focus on ad relevance, I wonder if we’ll see fewer Classmates.com ads…probably wishful thinking.

Ads Enhancing User Experience
Tanzina Vega from the New York Times examines the content and advertising model of a weekly digital magazine – Nomad Editions – scheduled to launch in the fall. The content of each weekly issue will focus on a specific topic such as surfing or movies and feature the work of freelance writers with expertise in the area. Via Treesaver, the magazine will be accessible on any device that has a web browser and offer advertisers the ability to be the full sponsor with eight ads per edition. Marjorie W. Martay, the executive vice president for sales and marketing for Nomad Editions says of the magazine’s approach to advertising: “I’m trying to have a marketer tell a story.” Such narrow magazine content should provide marketers a focused, interested audience and afford them a unique opportunity to weave a compelling advertising narrative throughout an issue.

Interpreting User (In)action
Evan LaPointe at Search Engine Land makes the argument that non-converting SEM and SEO traffic is still valuable as the user base choosing whether or not to interact with your ads is essentially a focus group providing feedback about your marketing techniques. What better way to measure the relevance of your ads than reading the signals of your target audiences directly? A bigger question: what technologies enable marketers to test messaging with different audience segments and then measuring effectiveness (relevance), iterate on learnings, and test again? Hmm…