I had the opportunity to speak on my particular area of interest within digital advertising at Revolve Conf last week here in Charleston, SC and thoroughly enjoyed myself. No one told me directly that I had wasted their time so I assume it was useful for at least most of those in attendance as well…
I thought I’d take the time to summarize the presentation here for personal record and public availability. While I’m going on record, I just have to state that the conference was absolutely terrific. Karl and the team put on a best in class event. I’ll do a round up post of the conference soon(ish) to go into more detail. In the meantime, checkout Ben Callahan’s Collaborative Notes from various talks.
Now for the main event. Here are the slides from my talk and some additional details beneath each slide. I read once and believe that a good presentation deck should serve as support to the speaker, not constitute a document that can stand on its own. That is certainly true here.
Title slide. Thanks Pexels.com as always for great stock photos.
I like to be clear with the audience up front so they have time to leave if desired
After some trial runs with guinea pigs at my office, I realized I needed to define up front exactly what I mean when I say “programmatic” and exactly what type of advertising I’m addressing. I also learned from those beta testers that I needed to give a sense of the scale of programmatic digital advertising and at least a brief explanation of how it came to be just to orient the audience.
This is my working definition of “programmatic” when applied to digital advertising.
I also needed to clarify for the audience on exactly what star within the galaxy of “digital advertising” I intended to focus. I wanted to be clear that, yes, I actually was just talking about those little, annoying banner ads you see when reading articles and what-not online, as opposed to SEM, Facebook/Twitter ads, etc. I also committed a typographcal error. You’d think after 15 hours of prep I’d have noticed it at some point.
I also wanted to make it clear that companies spend a lot of money on those annoying little banner ads. Like. A lot of money.
Having provided a brief orientation to the market context, I took a moment to situate everyone historically as well. As a history major myself this was absolutely inevitable.
My point here is that the ad-supported model did not change substantially when content went online.
I could not resist a quick walk down Internet memory lane to show what, as legend has it, was the first online display ad in history. You can learn even more wonderful tidbits about the historic event at thefirstbannerad.com.
I could not resist dedicating a slide to the fact that, along with AT&T, MCI, Volvo, Club Med, and 1800Collect, none other than ZIMA, that crystal clear malt beverage of yore, was one of the first brands to employ banner ads. Cheers!
This is a picture from Mad Men, the AMC show you may have heard of. I used this picture as a background while I explained how, not only did the monetization model not change when content went online, the model for buying & selling advertising space did not change either.
This slide marks a major transition in the presentation. Having provided brief but sufficient context, I shifted my focus to the whole point of the presentation.
I consider the technology that makes Real-Time Bidding possible to be mind-blowing. I decided to use an actual image of a real-life auction to provide some frame of reference.
People take a lot of heat in digital advertising for treating “programmatic” and “RTB” as synonyms. I took a second here just to explain that they are, in fact, not. Nothing does the trick like a good ol’ Venn Diagram.
You may recognize this diagram from “The Rise of the Platform Marketer” by Craig Dempster and John Lee of Merkle. It is an excellent depiction of the process (now that they fixed a typo thanks to me. True story…) but doesn’t make the process itself any simpler. It’s still an intimidating mechanism to encounter.
It takes a layman to explain things in layman’s terms. I am just such a layman. As such, I decided to conduct a group exercise in which I had participants play the roles of publisher & advertisers bidding on the impression as the page loads. This part of the presentation is much more interesting in action.
The publisher site was the Idaho Statesman and the winning bid was from “Phone OM,” I cleverly-named but fictitious wireless provider I made up.
With the group exercise over, I transitioned to the “predict the future” stage of the presentation. This is where I explained how the use of data & technology through programmatic advertising to increase efficiency and deliver more relevant, personalized ads will be employed for all screens and all content, even out-0f-home. It didn’t feel like predicting the future so much as stating an obvious fact that wasn’t quite true in the present tense.
I was extremely relieved to get some great questions from the audience. This topic opens up so many interesting that a lack of questions means a lack of presenting well.
Watch the talk
If you would actually like to watch the talk yourself, you’re in luck! I recorded it on my iPhone and posted it to YouTube. The video quality is not professional grade to say the least but it’s better than nothing I figure.
That’s all for now. Would love to hear what anyone thinks. About anything really but in this case specifically about digital advertising in the programmatic era.
