Display Sucks...Long Live Display...Someone Help

Nice ad right, well if it were a display ad it would be a flashing mess of disgustingness that everyone would hate.

A couple of weeks back I had the pleasure of attending the DPAC II conference here in NYC. The overwhelming message that I heard was that while display advertising was essential to publishers and advertisers, the current state of display advertising did not provide a platform for the long term success of their business. This discussion came rushing back to me today, when I read Darren Herman's post on the continued relevance of display marketing.

Darren's reasons why display remains relevant and essential:

• No replacement - We've got search and display, nothing else is even close...at this point, or at any point in the near term
• Scale - Standard units and organizations that efficiently price, serve and track those units
• Comprehension - Clients understand what display ads are and what they do
• Works - Do it right you get return

I agree on each of these points and at DPAC advertisers and publishers seemed resigned to the fact that display in all its "inefficient" glory was absolutely necessary. Still the debate rages on between agencies like Weiden Kennedy who would just rather throw in the towel on branded display, while Neo@Ogilvy are clamoring for more display focusing on relevance through targeting. The fact is, display is not going anywhere, but in order for it to grow it must evolve beyond its current targeting obsessed state.

Our position at Sympact is that display will evolve and that the pairing of content and contexto-personal relevance within display is a winning combination. There is ample evidence that targeting provides a historical perspective on the individual viewer and semantic/context cues on the page itself can assist in pairing an ad contextually. However, the issue remains, having targeted to this granular level the advertiser and publisher are left with a myriad of audience slivers too small to allocate creative spend towards.So what is the solution?

The solution, is to use all of this available data as ad content. That dynamic content when paired with a brand logo and message delivers a highly relevant, personally tailored message with the kind of scale that gets the attention of big audiences, big brands and big publishers. The next evolution of display is tailoring, and those companies that make ad tailoring simple will win.

At least that's one path. The other is too make consistently brilliant display ad units like Apple does. That'll get their attention, it just the cost vs reach is out of whack. The fact is display as an advertising delivery mechanism is here to stay, how it is displayed remains in flux. Those companies, like Sympact, who are increasing returns and looking into how display converts beyond the click will be the reason for the ongoing and expanded use of display advertising.

What survives in 2009

The world seems to be coming apart at the seams as the financial frameworks which underpin our markets and the gushing liquidity that those massively scalable frameworks generated is drying up. The big problem with the liquidity gusher drying up is that a lot of businesses are being revealed to be lousy, over leveraged, low value creation enterprises.

As a startup value creation is an acute concern as you're only as good as the value that you generate. When markets are great, the perception of value can be all it takes to garner customers, funding and hopefully significant revenue. With liquidity drying up conceptual  or "long term" value creation lose their import as your clients may not last for the long term.

So as I think about who survives in 2009-2010, I think it's those businesses whose barometer for success is ROI (Gratuitous Link).Bound up in that equation are concepts like accountability, transparency and real asset value. For the next few years businesses engaged in clear value creation will be the ones that survive, whether they are a startup or a multi-billion dollar international corporation. It's time to slog.

Personalization and why it's on the minds of marketers

A few weeks back we were speaking to a couple of smart folks who mentioned a company Monetate that was doing some really cool stuff to optimize landing pages by personalizing these pages to the individual. Curious, I began to snoop around their site and think up some angles for a conversation.

Life took over and I lost the thread of following up with Monetate till today when I clicked over to their blog and saw an interesting post entitled "At Shop.org the word is personalize". Now we prefer the word "tailor" since it seems that tailoring is easier to implement at scale then personalization, but the truth is that all marketing communications delivered digitally will continue to evolve towards personalization. At the root of this movement is the idea that advertising is no longer about distraction, but about relevant engagement. Relevant engagement alters the advertising formula by increasing the importance of the information over the style. Google has always claimed that its text link ads are not ads, but rather complementary pieces of content.

This complementary content is what all ads, retail sites, news sites, et al are evolving their platforms to achieve. For years personalization was a theory, but with the speed and power of our ever evolving technical infrastructure and new agile design frameworks we can make personalization a simple utility to turn on and increase the value of marketing. Shop.org is about online retail, but the same lessons these savvy marketers are preaching will continue to filter across all media and retail experiences.

Thanks for the heads up Monetate folks.