You can't skim articles on digital related ventures without stumbling across something about an ad network. That's essentially a company that will buy or sell advertising inventory online based on demographic or psychographic characteristics. For example you might work with BET Digital Ad Group to target African Americans, or Modern Living Media (part of Value Click) to target individuals looking for home improvement. Then, after a while you wonder why you'd even go to an ad network instead of an ad exchange -- which has access to inventory on all these vertical platforms.
In the recent article from Ad Age "Let a Thousand Ad Networks Bloom" the author encourages the advent of more and more ad networks. More and more choice should increase the competition and drive down prices. And, all of this choice is advantageous for companies that want to to increase their brand awareness or who have the technology to track the effectiveness of such campaigns.
What no one talks about is how much work it is to use ad networks. Have you ever tried to work with one? In order to tell if your banner ad for a cherry red shirt results in a sale you need to pixel (or add tech code) on your company's conversion pages. Imagine the time and resources requires to open up 100 various conversion pages and dropping Ad Network X's pixels on it. It is labor intensive and a small typo can render all the results invalid. What's worse is what happens when you decide that you dont like the results of working with network X? You've gotta start all over again and add 100 new pixels to your conversion pages to work with network Y. This becomes a vicious cycle and one that takes immense work for your employees. Ultimately all of this hard work and use of resources doesn't provide companies with more choice for their ad dollars. Instead it makes it more difficult and locks you into working with just one network (what a great business strategy).
So ultimately while maybe more choice is nice, it is a bit ironic that it actually creates less choice.
article:
http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/a-generation-ad-networks/229772/
No comments:
Post a Comment