If you haven’t seen the article from last week titled “Forbes Expands Ad Guarantee Program“  it got me thinking and writing. So here’s my post.

Forbes is “guaranteeing reach and frequency” for its ad buys. But only if you are part of an elite group who spend a serious amount of money on Forbes per year. Hmm, so Forbes doesn’t guarantee reach for the proletariat? If we don’t deliver the reach we promised (as per the IO), we either continue the campaign until it delivers or refund the money. I’m not sure what it means to guarantee it. Guaranteeing frequency? Well, we do that (as I’m sure others do). We’ll frequency cap the ads so the user doesn’t tire from seeing the same ad, if that’s what the advertiser wants. Basically, I’m confused about the point of the article or what Forbes was trying to say.  
 
The article goes on to state that Forbes is against the proliferation of ad networks. I guess it’s ok to say that. It’s their opinion. But the article didn’t spend enough time on why. Let me open on a couple of reasons why Forbes could think this is a good idea (and then quickly plug YuMe while doing so…)

First - Ad Networks take away business from Owned and Operated (O&O) sites such as Forbes. Well, Forbes of all magazines should be OK with a bit of friendly competition. What are they afraid of?  That we’ll outperform them because we have a far larger set of content, uniques and publishers so we can optimise and spread the ad around better to make the campaign perform better?

Second - Ad Networks are devaluing O&O inventory?  Maybe the display and search businesses sold their inventory blind, but we don’t. Everthing is transparent and we sell inventory at premium prices, while have the ability to blend in other inventory to lower the effective cpm for the advertiser, yet maintaining the campaign metrics and goals.

Third - When advertiser go to the O&O publisher and the publisher is sold out, they shouldn’t have another choice, so they simply book their ad campaign next month or next year, instead of finding another alternative. See the first point above. Sounds pretty anti capitalist to me.

- Jayant Kadambi

Targeting is a funny thing (funny strange, not funny ha ha). Every Advertiser wants targeting. They want to know if people are left handed so they can pitch them left handed golf club ads. And if they are interested in golf, they figure they can pitch them a really expensive, left-handed set of golf clubs.

The issue with targeting on video (or for that matter anything) is that as you get more granularity on the audience, the smaller the inventory pool.  Audiences (18-24 yr. old males) become niches (18-24 yr. old males who like golf) and niches become micro-niches (18-24 yr. old males who like golf and were visiting golf club sites).

So, the general problem is that once you find the micro-niche for the advertiser, they’re happy and in turn they’ll run the campaign. Then everything is great, until the campaign completes and it under-delivers. Micro-niches have this nasty habit of reducing the available pool of people.  

So what’s the solution? Reach and scale. In behavioural targeting terms, it’s called overlap. If you have a large potential audience (we do - 134MM), the odds of finding people who have been shopping around for a car (proxied by people who have visited car websites or been watching car videos, etc.) in your network for that niche grow higher. And you’ll get more of them as a result, which means intent-based or behavioural targeting opportunities will be more relevant.

We recently announced the capability to do just this across our  network. We waited until we had grown to a point where we could provide a meaningful audience for advertisers. Because few things are more frustrating than being sold the ability to find left-handed males who are golfers and then finding out that the network has 3 people.  It’s hard to go back to the client and tell them that their targeted spend under-delivered badly.

YuMe’s behavioural targeting solution is pretty simple… we have reach and scale on a national level, offering advanced targeting and optimization capabilities that make video ads perform… that’s just it.

- Jayant Kadambi