Quality Control — lessons from the past.

Chris Lewis-Jones
Jul 21, 2017 · 7 min read

Broadly speaking there are three types of commentary on digital advertising. The type that raves about it. The type that tells us how we can save it, and the type that calls bullshit on the whole lot.

The truth of course lies somewhere between and I think we have to look back to move forward.

Remember when advertising on the internet was new? When it meant a PPC search ad or a banner ad that you paid for by the thousand and everything was served on a ‘desktop’? Of course you do, it really wasn’t that long ago.

Back then we did deals with media owners just like we did in other channels and we genuinely cared about quality. I mean we cared at a placement level about the environment and context in which our ads appeared. Now we just pay lip service to it with verification tech. We bought on tenancy when the tactics merited it, we got value for volume deals, we had a say in how many ad units publishers put on their pages, we used content and context as a proxy for audience which by and large worked. It might have cost a bit more but you knew exactly what you were getting and if you didn’t get what you paid for you got compensated. Clicks were valuable and we actually got to see the creative execution before building a plan. Cookies worked and retargeting pixels delivered more relevant ads rather than being a licence to stalk people around the internet. In short, quality was top of the agenda.

Sure it was pretty simple stuff, execution wasn’t automated, we weren’t collecting much data, we knew little about audiences beyond their immediate context and we certainly weren’t attributing across conversion paths let alone building things like device graphs and custom bidding algorithms but when has simple ever been a bad thing? We rave about simplicity everywhere else. ‘The secret of a great idea is in its simplicity’. ‘That creative execution is beautifully simple’. ‘Wow, that insight simplifies the task perfectly’. So why does it feel like we have we been on a decade long mission to complicate digital advertising?

I don’t think the answer is complicated. We planned digital advertising based on reach because we thought it was going to work just like all the other advertising channels. We got obsessed by reach and the fact that we could ‘accurately’ measure it. We never stopped to think about the long term implications and opportunities the technology was going to create. Instead it was head down to figure how we could transplant the traditional advertising approach on to the internet, charge a higher fee for it and scale it as quickly as possible.

Networks, the precursor to trading desks, signalled the beginning of the end. The race for accountable and precise reach was on and digital advertising has never recovered. It’s a race that has ruined the advertising potential of mobile devices, crushed data quality and started an opaque ad tech arms race. All the while creating confusion and uncertainty in the industry and just flat out annoying people in the real world. Have you seen what an ‘optimised for viewability’ placement looks like on the desktop web? You are lucky if the title of the article is even in view yet everyone is scrambling for these impressions and paying a premium for them to boot. Spend five minutes surfing consumer sites in verticals like autos and consumer tech and you’ll quickly see what a poor experience it is.

Mobile certainly hasn’t been any kind of saviour. I’d hazard a guess it’s 10 years since someone first shrunk a banner ad and served it on a mobile web browser and effectively created the dreaded 300x50 banner. It is still the primary source of open web and in-app mobile inventory today. Nuts. Social advertising and video have potential but we’re not exactly smashing it here either. Just how good is the first three seconds of a TV ad as it interrupts your feed and eats up your data? Oh, and hands up if you can remember watching an on demand program with well frequency capped adverts? Thought not.

You can’t single out people for blame, after all it’s simple supply and demand. If an advertiser wants to put a banner ad on your site why wouldn’t you create more inventory? Especially when your livelihood depends on it and technology is driving down the price. If every TV advertiser wants to use your VOD channel to add incremental reach why wouldn’t you shut out third part tracking and spray the same ad five times in a the same show? Somewhere along the way we forgot about the user experience and got into a vicious cycle of chasing audiences and collecting data without any real thought for what the person at the end of the supply chain was actually seeing. We need to break the cycle but with many stakeholders making a lot of money there has to be a sense of jeopardy. A genuine threat to businesses if they don’t adapt. Perhaps the combination of the subscription internet and ad blocking is it but does it feel real enough yet?

Looking back on those early days in the context of the current landscape it is clear that we missed a massive opportunity. We were perfectly poised to take that focus on quality and use the growth of connectivity to create meaningful and interesting experiences that people might just care about. Instead we took arguably the two most transformative technologies of modern times (the internet and the mobile phone) and all we could muster was a series of squares and rectangles placed awkwardly on the edge of a screen.

It may not be anyone’s fault per se but it is definitely our collective responsibility to try and fix it. The ultimate solution might be along the lines of a radical redesign of all commercial websites coupled with a blockchain powered advertising system and there are some interesting initiatives trying to move us in that direction at the moment. The team at Brave have their Basic Attention Token (BAT) to try and readdress the value exchange, the very smart guys at People.io are driving value for both advertisers and consumers with a permission based data exchange and the Coalition for Better Ads, well I’m not really sure what it does but it exists and that’s a start!

All of this is commendable but the reality is that for change to start happening it has to be iterative rather than wholesale and there is plenty we can be doing within the current framework of digital advertising to improve things. It starts with bringing back that focus on quality.

Put context front and centre. Content, environment, device, connection type, OS, platform, time of day, day of week, mood the list goes on and on. Contextual data signals are much better indicators of quality than opaque third party behavioural data sets. Use programmatic execution to leverage context properly and your ad effectiveness will grow.

Have a desktop strategy — it’s time to stop bolting mobile ads onto your default digital plan and time to start planning for separately for each device. Think about the user experience first and the mechanics of execution second. Do you really want to sacrifice quality of experience for a bump in viewability figures?

Focus on frequency — There needs to a renewed focus on controlling frequency at a user level. Think carefully about the rules you set, if a user moves into a different targeting bucket is their exposure going to double? If this means consolidating into a single DSP to meaningfully control frequency across channels and devices then do it.

Talk about relevance not reach — Digital platforms and devices are ubiquitous and by extension so is digital media. Media owners, stop talking about how you have 70% of the Facebook population because that doesn’t matter anymore. Reaching lots of people is not a USP. Talk about why your environments are the best place to communicate with that audience. Talk about how user behaviour on your sites and platforms differs based on context.

Reinstate the importance of the creative — do not start planning a campaign until you know what the message is. Sounds ludicrously simple I know but media plans go out the door all the time having had no sight of the creative. The percentage I’m hearing anecdotally is ridiculously high.

Collaborate — stop land grabbing from the other agencies on your client’s roster and start working with them. Ad tech is pushing the creative and media processes further apart so help your clients understand why it has to come back together. Don’t just get everyone in the room for the brief but respond in tandem with the other agencies. The work will immediately improve.

Focus on speed — Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles have shown us that speed is the new premium and companies like NEXD are putting it front and centre of creative builds. Make sure your ads are light and fast.

Go direct — don’t be afraid of doing direct deals when the situation warrants it. We need more partnerships to creative more meaningful experiences for people.

I’m sure there are plenty of other things that could be done but I think this is a good starting point and if we can adhere to some of this we should start to see significant improvements. As Simon Andrews from addictive said recently in the always excellent Fix newsletter ‘the best way to optimise a digital media plan is to have good creative, that is informed and enhanced by the data available on the audience and the context.’

So back to those three types of commentary. If you’re raving about the precision and addressability of technology remember that for every perfectly targeted ad someone sees they have seen a hundred terrible ones which makes that perfect one way less effective. If you’re pushing a radical new solution to ‘fix’ digital advertising think about the context of what can be done today. Finally for the Mark Ritson’s and Bob Hoffman’s of the world we all love a bit provocation and you talk a lot of sense but ultimately you can’t get away with blithely ignoring the internet, the most transforming technology of our time, as a viable advertising platform.

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Chris Lewis-Jones

Written by

Executive Director at OMD UK, expect thoughts on various aspects of media and advertising, all thoughts are my own etc

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