Queries Per Second - RTB Complexities

Ramsey McGrory of the Right Media Exchange recently said in an AdExchanger article:

"For example, it's very difficult for a DSP or an agency trading desk to consistently respond to 35,000 QPS (queries per second) no matter the stated SLA (service level agreement) because their infrastructure may not be able to handle that load or they may not have enough data to have a point-of-view on all of the different inventory."

As someone who is tasked with sorting out this issue for a digital media technology supplier this is a VERY real issue.    Sorting out how to do this is not a simple thing.   There are two main issues that make this horribly complex:  Speed and Data Scale.   


So lets take each one seperately and talk about what it means.   The first one "Speed" is quite simple.    Dealing with 35,000 queries per second is quite the computational problem.   You need to evaluate a massively large amount of queries and do so in a way that you respond within 15ms.   The trick or challenge in this whole thing is make sure that you handle the number of queries in a way that deliver upon your brands value proposition to the market effectively.   I can't release how we are cutting this but I can say it required me to pull in resources from wall street and silicon valley.

The next is data scale.    Data scale is a real tricky one.    If you cookie the consumers or base it on profiles you have a pretty implicitly scale issue because you are required to see the use again and the data is prone to issues of decay on the cookie variables.  The trick is to find a slice of data that the brands find as premium for targeting ad environments that supports the brands goals.

All of this is "tres" complicated but none the less a fun problem for a nerd like me.   

I
LOVE
THIS
SHTUFF!     

The main problem I see in this whole equation is that ad agencies are going to struggle to define their position in all of this because they are not primary data owners.   At best the data they have represents aggregates of other peoples data with post click data by chance.  This has a few problems to it...  

1) Aggregate matches take time and massive infrastructure.  Technology infrastructure is not in the agencies DNA.    More so the aggregate game of multiple cookie matches gives nothing more then DR optimization levers.  The need to create their own down past the aggregate becomes absolutely needed.

2) As $$$ continue to flow into the ecosystem the cost of everything rises as its a demand driven market.  The value of the middle men becomes tougher and tougher to justify as the squeeze begins to really hit as demand raises the supply price.  The squeeze means its difficult to justify high technology costs required to invest in problem #1 infrastructure and data.

Developing Consumer Experiences Through Media

So lately I have been using the term "consumer experience" alot in what I do day to day.   In fact it is something that I have not baked into the company I am currently employed at.    So I wanted to take sometime to talk about what a consumer experience could and should be within media and how that is intended to service a brand.   

So lets start with taking the Wikipedia definition of consumer experience (customer experience):


Customer experience (CX) is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier. From awareness, discovery, attraction, interaction, purchase, use, cultivation and advocacy. It can also be used to mean an individual experience over one transaction; the distinction is usually clear in context.

This is often something that the silicon valley advertising/media technology companies systemically forget.   This is something I pride myself on constantly remembering.   So how do I go about making sure that this is something I consistently consider when making media/advertising decisions?   I do so by applying the following filter:

The role of advertising and media is to excite the consumer based on the core value proposition of the brand while being cognizant of what mindset they were in or function they were performing while consuming the individual media channel that the advert ran on. 


So then the goal of a media company is to build rich experiences through media that serve as a functional and/or emotional mechanism to excite the consumer within the constraints of the channel and what they were doing with the channel.   


So the role of the savvy media professional is to understand based on the channel and the intended mindset of the consumer that caused them to consume the individual media channel and align that to the brand based on the goal or objective of the brand...

Fundamentally this is what marketers call "strategy" which the below image depicts well less the fact that they do not call out media research separately from market research.   

So what does all this mean?    Well let's start to think about good and bad consumer experiences by giving some basic examples...


BAD CONSUMER EXPERIENCE DRIVEN BY TECHNOLOGY:


Behavioral targeting is one of those technologies that delivers truly BAD consumer experiences.  Allow me to explain.


A consumer visits a few car blogs and forums.    The consumer has a cookie dropped on them and suddenly they start seeing ads wherever they go on the web through retargeting.   Despite the fact that they have mentally moved on to other things like entertainment, consumption of news and away from the process of researching automotive options.


BAD BAD BAD EXPERIENCE.


This is the trap that most silicon valley data/technology companies get themselves into.  A consumer could be reading an article on a massive 10 car pile up but since they read some automotive sites they are receiving buy a new car message while consuming media on death through automotive.   How on earth does this serve the brand?  From upper funnel to lower funnel this is a terrible way to message a consumer.   Tsk tsk silicon valley.


NOT SO GOOD CONSUMER EXPERIENCE DRIVEN BY CONTENT VERTICALIZATION


Another example of a sub-par consumer experience is when advertisers leverage vertical content networks to drop ads.     For example an advertiser is trying to reach mommies to build advocacy among there new food product that drives value to the consumer through an efficiently priced organic and healthy product.   The advertiser wants to add "Likes" to their facebook brand presence of this product.   So they launch the ad on a vertical mom blogger content network


So why is this not so good....


Well Mommies are not created one the same and more so mommies are arriving on these content locations within the content network for a TON of different reasons.  Reasons ranging from recipe hunting, parenting advice, food advice, deal seeking, etc.. etc.. etc...  Fundamentally they are all in different mindsets.


The questions the advertiser should of asked themselves is what type of mommy are we looking for and what is important to them.   In this example they are value focused and concerned about the ingredients they use to feed their family.   What should of been done is the advertiser looks for places that deliver THAT VALUE to the mommies by finding content areas that are involved in how mommies deliver value for their families through healthy and high quality ingredients.   To create the advocacy the brand was looking for the brand should focus on living in places WHERE THE VALUE ADVOCACY ALREADY EXISTS!


In addition if you want mommies to create advocacy for the brand the brand must advocate the mom's values by distributing MORE INFORMATION on how they can deliver value focused healthy eating options to their family.   Help the consumer based on your value proposition and advocacy nature comes.  Creative execution has a BIG impact.  Mess that up and your media choices are in vain.  

Simple simple simple.

GOOD CONSUMER EXPERIENCE.

So what is a good consumer experience?     Quite simplistically it embodies the following statement:

RIGHT PERSON, RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT AD, RIGHT TIME


In order to do that you need the right placement that aligns to the consumer contextually and represents a mindset that excites the value of the brand/product proposition.    It is a creative execution that helps the consumer in a way that represents value to them based on the mindset they were in. 

This is something that can and is being done at scale in digital technologies when the right technologies are applied to help advertisers understand the content and mindset of the consumer in a way that has scale and is easy to use.   That is what I focus on every day and has become not only a personal mission but now a mission that my company BuzzLogic embodies. 

Develop rich experiences that excite consumers based on what they were trying to do and how that aligns to a brand.   This is my filter and this is my mission.   This is what I will spend my career in media/advertising doing.

Simple, elegant and totally focused on leveraging data and technology to power consumer insights and market research in a way that delivers value to both brand and consumer.

Digital Video Upfronts and the Elusive GRP

So this years upfront result news should include a lot about budgets being shifted to a digital platform through online video as a part of the news.  From speaking to people around the industry who run accounts it seems that people are shifting a noticable portion of video impressions from a television vehicle to display based vehicle through the wild wooly internets (intentional misspelling folks). 

Now being a 21st century digital boy I of course applaud this idea but I do have some pretty big concerns.   Why you ask?  Well an online impression is NO way like a television impression.  In fact its ability to obtain and achieve attention in a way that is sticky and something that the consumer remembers is what I am calling into question.   

Allow me to explain.   Lets start by understanding the GRP which is the common currency for television video markets.   A GRP is quite simple %reach X frequency.  So this should be attainable in digital video right?  WRONG.   Lets use as an example television buying the UK vs the US and how it is planned differently.   In the US we generally apply a 3+ or 4+ frequency when we are doing our planning in media.   However in the UK the general frequency used in planning is a 1+ frequency.  The agencies/brands have sets of tools based on syndicate research that inform them this is the optimal level in order to achieve their brands goals against the audience.    

The question to ask in order to uncover the whole issue is what makes the frequencies different per market?   Quite simply the answer is clutter and universe avails.  In other words less ads in the UK available as the total # of avails.  

So how does that inform me about the issues in digital?   Well the total # of avails are for starters unknown as they are constraint to the consumer pathway.  In addition the fact that the publishers themselves are unclear on the distribution of avails due to the fact that the publishers are shipping out a ton to remnant supply channels.  

Quite simply no constraint universe no ability to control clutter.  How could you prove this?  Look at the adstock decay of a given TV impression for a digital impression.   I havent done the study myself but I would be curious to see the results.  Has anyone done this?  I can not find any results of a study yet there are dollars flowing left and right.

These facts by themselves are deal breakers on an impression to impression level or even allowing GRP to be the currency here.    I am not even touching on the fact that the "experience" of the video on television is most likely a far more receptive platform for brand influence than on the web.   This will change over time as tv will become more functional (active engagement) and tablets/computers will become more entertainment oriented (passive engagement).  But for now this media nerd thinks impression swapping on tv and digital with the expectation that it is a 1to1 swap is the wrong approach for any marketers. 

Congrats to [x+1] and Nardone

I wanted to take the time to say congratulations to [x+1] for closing an additional round of funding.

I was a client of theirs at Omnicom and a big fan of what they are doing.

Congrats Nardone on some fine work!

AdExchanger Predictions

  

Check out my predictions for 2011 on AdExchanger

Data ManBearPig

As someone who is actively using data driven buying tactics to build my business I am exposed to a series of different data providers and more so exposed to the result of comparing these providers against each other.   Is anyone in the industry going to call out the complete lack of consistency that exists between the providers?    I have done a few rich analysis' on the providers by aligning the results of individual audience attributes supplied by multiple providers.  What did that yield me?   One ManBearPig.   Individuals ended up being called out as both genders and in conflicting audience clusters.   Just curious if anyone else is seeing the fundamental flaws in the current data business' as it seems like everyone is hanging their hat on it.