As digital display ad spending has continued to grow over
the past several years, advertisers have looked for ways to exercise greater
control over when and where ads are displayed across the web. The key concern
of advertisers is that their ad will be displayed next to undesirable site
content such as “…fake news sites or offensive YouTube videos” and possibly
negatively impacting their brand.
One major institution, JPMorgan Chase, is going to extreme
measures to combat this site display concern. To exercise greater control over
where ads are displayed, JPMorgan has enlisted a whitelisting technique,
limiting its ads to about 5,000 preapproved sites. Prior to this JPMorgan had
advertisements being displayed on about 400,000 sites, a typical amount for
large companies that use automated tools to touch as many consumers as possible
online. This whitelisting effort by JPMorgan was initiated “…this month after
The New York Times showed it an ad for Chase’s private client services on a
site called Hillary 4 Prison. It was under a headline claiming that the actor
Elijah Wood had revealed ‘the horrifying truth about the Satanic liberal
perverts who run Hollywood.’”
This shift by JPMorgan represents a larger, underlying skepticism
in the industry on how effective and cost efficient automated display ad
technology is. Automated technology has provided advertisers with the ability
to buy “…ads on individual sites in favor of cheaply targeting groups of people
across the web based on their browsing habits, a process known as programmatic advertising.”
The risk vs reward of this approach is not always clear, and JPMorgan began considering
the impact of creating their whitelist and reduced the number of sites they
display ads on.
As some background on what JPMorgan did to reduce the number
of sites, “…Of the 400,000 web addresses JPMorgan’s ads showed up on in a
recent 30-day period, said Ms. Lemkau, only 12,000, or 3 percent, led to
activity beyond an impression. An intern then manually clicked on each of those
addresses to ensure that the websites were ones the company wanted to advertise
on. About 7,000 of them were not, winnowing the group to 5,000.”
Although this tactic has only been in use for several weeks,
JPMorgan has seen no deterioration in their performance metrics. For firms like
JPMorgan Chase, who are able expend the capital, this is a simple solution to
help prevent/reduce display ad PR issues. This may not be a viable solution for
all advertisers, as the benefit of the programmatic advertising is the cost
effectiveness of targeting specific customers. Additionally, if a trend begins
to take hold in the industry, with others following the JPMorgan approach, you
could see a change in the way ad tech companies handle sales. In the current
environment, these ad tech companies “…profit from funneling trillions of ad
impressions from brands to consumers.” By actively reducing the number of sites
allowed to display ads (i.e. from 400,000 to 5,000), ad tech companies may need
to change their approach and how they market their services.
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