An Ad Network Story

March 3rd, 2010

When I started Consorte Media I talked a lot about how Hispanic marketing relied on anecdotal evidence as opposed to actual data. Now I have a different story to tell.

I started Consorte Media in the closet of my one bedroom apartment in July 2005 and at the time I was solely focused on online lead generation. My first problem, however, was that my customers loved my leads and wanted more.

In the summer of 2005, if you entered a Spanish language search on Google in the U.S., more often than not, you got back English results. This meant that many people in the U.S. didn’t use search to find their Spanish media and instead went directly to Spanish language websites they knew of in the U.S. or Latin America. This also meant that the volume of Spanish language searches in the U.S. on Google at the time was low and therefore I was constrained in the number of leads I could generate via search. The alternative was to buy display media on the leading Spanish language publishers in the U.S., like Univision.com and AOL Latino, etc. The only problem was the cost of media on those sites was exorbitantly high. They were charging upwards of $25 CPMs at the time and I could not get the math to work to generate leads and not lose money on the deal. That’s what led me to uncover hundreds of websites in Spanish – from the very large to the very small – sites I had never heard of before I started my digging.

I started calling on these websites and would invariably end up on the phone with the CEOs or owners. These sites often did not have full-time web developers or webmasters much less ad sales teams. I started talking to these publishers about their problems.

This was the story they told: no one was calling on them to buy ads on their sites, their only monetization alternative was Google Ad Sense and that often resulted in English ads, their only alternative was large Latin American Ad Networks that only served ads to Latin American visitors and almost all CPA campaigns (remember those horrible flash smiley face ads? Then you know what they were contending with) or English Ad Networks in the U.S. who only served publishers with large amounts of traffic and of course, only served English language ads.

A lot has changed since those initial calls with publishers. First, a little history:

Two of the original ad networks in the Hispanic space were Click Diario (started in Guatemala in 2003) and Directa Networks. Both networks were focused on Latin America and mostly served CPA campaigns.
In September 2005, ClickDiario was acquired by Livedoor and in June 2007 sold to Fox International Channels. Shortly after, it was merged with the purchase of Click Diario by Fox to create Punto Fox.

At around the same time (2003), in the U.S., the Hispanic Digital Network (HDN) was formed. HDN started out as a web development company and built websites for leading publishers. As part of their web development agreement with publishers HDN acquired a publisher’s advertising inventory. HDN itself was acquired by PR Newswire in 2008.

Then in 2004, Hispanoclick came along. Started by a husband and wife team in Canada (the wife is a Latina), Hispanoclick was also primarily focused on performance campaigns. Hispanoclick was acquired by Batanga at the end of 2007.

In 2006, Consorte Media purchased ad inventory on Directa, Click Diario, HDN and Hispanoclick in an attempt to drive leads. Finally, necessity being the mother of invention: the Consorte Media Ad Network was born in the spring of 2007.

When we started calling on publishers to join our ad network we heard more stories. Publishers were often locked up in year-long exclusive ad network agreements with ad networks that either didn’t provide campaigns at all or only rarely. These publishers were then justifiably skeptical about “ad networks” in general.

When we hit the advertiser circuit, we learned exactly why many of the early Hispanic ad networks had trouble – the shift to online advertising dollars was only barely starting to happen in the Hispanic market. A situation made worse by the fact that many Hispanic agencies at the time had not developed digital expertise and were focused only on television, radio or print.

So at the beginning there was a lot to overcome and a lot to balance. Since then we’ve switched ad servers (from Zedo to Right Media to DFP). We’ve had reporting issues and had to finally build our own system. We’ve had to create our own payment processing solution, which, as any ad network (general market ad networks, too) will tell you is terribly manual and involves a lot of juggling. We’ve been paid late by advertisers or not at all and had to pay publishers anyway. You get the picture. We made a lot of mistakes but we also learned a tremendous amount.

Since our entry there have been some general market ad networks that announced they were entering the space: for example, Glam Media and Gorilla Nation – only to pretty much abandon the efforts a year later. And of course, many of the large U.S. general market ad networks like Advertising.com and ValueClick started yelling, “Me, too!” in the advertising marketplace only to turn around and ask companies like Consorte Media to fulfill their campaigns.

After the advent of Adify – a company that licenses a packaged ad network infrastructure platform – some of the big publishers have jumped on the Ad Network bandwagon, like Orange/StarMedia, Terra (EZ Target) and Univision.com – each now touting their own ad networks.

Fox is still in the Hispanic Ad Network market, too but primarily focused on Latin America as opposed to U.S. Hispanic, as is Jumba. More recently, newer, smaller players have entered the U.S. Hispanic field like Hola Networks, Alcance (started by an ex-Consorte employee) and PulpoMedia (staffed with ex-Consorte employees). I actually get a kick out of the fact that some of these competitors have Consorte alums.

So a lot has taken place in the past few years. In essence, the Hispanic Ad Network market has evolved in a very similar manner to the U.S. general market ad network industry. Today, we’re definitely facing some of the same issues the U.S. general market is including the problem of several ad networks that are hard to differentiate.

Joe Kutchera recently wrote an article on Hispanic Ad Networks and left us off the competitive matrix. To give you a sense, Comscore has our reach at 2MM monthly unique visitors, Quantcast and our own servers show ten times that amount. Reach, however, is not what matters to publishers. Publishers care about eCPM. And frankly, reach is often not what matters to advertisers. Advertisers care about brand safety and thus, transparency – where is their ad going to show up and will they be happy it did.

The reality is that all of us say the same thing to attract publishers: we promise high eCPMs and leading advertisers. We say the same things to attract advertisers: we work with great sites, can target anything and everything everywhere, and have great reach. It’s difficult to stand out from a marketing viewpoint when we’re all basically doing the same thing: matching advertisers with publishers.

How to truly differentiate Hispanic Ad Networks? The proof, you see, is in the pudding.

I drive Lizie, Consorte’s head of Publishers, crazy when I tell publishers, “You don’t have to choose Consorte Media and you shouldn’t only choose Consorte Media.”

I tell publishers, “You want to run as many ad tags as possible and you’ll soon discover how we’re all different. Some networks mainly serve CPA campaigns, others promise high CPMs but only have campaigns intermittently, some guarantee a CPM but it’s low and fixed and requires guaranteed inventory, others simply do media buys on websites when they have the need for traffic – whatever their goal.”

One publisher we were trying to recruit called to tell me he was going to sign an exclusive deal with another network. I said, “That’s great but why would you sign an exclusive deal?” He said another network could guarantee a $0.40 CPM for 6 months if he guaranteed X impressions.

“Wow,“ I said, “That sounds interesting, but is that a gamble you want to make? Especially when you don’t have to?”

He paused and let out a big sigh of relief.

Turns out the ad network story is not that different from my original story: actual results matter. There’s no need to rely on anecdotal when you can test the offerings available to you.

At the end of the day, we are happy to have competition because the growth of the Hispanic Ad Network industry is important. It means the content gap that existed a few years ago is being filled and that’s a good thing for everyone. Today, when you search in Spanish on Google in the U.S. you don’t get English results. The more ad networks make monetization possible for the content creators focused on the Hispanic market – the better. The eco-system grows and validates the Hispanic market and the Hispanic consumer – all I’ve ever wanted.

The End.

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Los pequeños secretos

June 28th, 2008

No es un secreto para nadie que no tengo una formación en el sector publicitario. Si tengo una formación en el sector financiero, pero ni quiera eso explica la conmoción que sentí cuando descubrí que nada suma correctamente en el mndo de la publicidad en línea.

Sí, lo dije. Y aparentemente no es un tema nuevo, solamente que mucha gente no habla de esto. Como por ejemplo, ni los números de alcance (“reach”) de los editores ni de las redes publicitarias tienen sentido. ¿Por qué? Porque los registros de los servidores no son iguales a los de comScore, Quantcast u otros métodos terceros. Y tiene sentido cuando se examinan detalladamente los métodos. Sin embargo, los anunciantes y agencias, con muy pocas excepciones, deben contar con servicios de terceros para obtener aprobación.

Por lo tanto, debo pagar mucho dinero, solo por una pequeña dosis de legitimidad; no obstante, sigue siendo una fasta, ya que cualquiera puede pagar y los números no significan nada.

Y es que, aparentemente a nadie le parece increíble que una empresa de análisis de tráfico muy reconocida proporcione datos completamente equivocados acerca del tráfico de una de las grandes empresas públicas.

Simplemente el hecho de que los servidores de anuncios dan números diferentes de manera consistente es suficiente para enloquecer a cualquiera. Aparentemente cada servidor de anuncios tiene una definición de “servido” (“delivered”) diferente.

Y como si el dilema con los números de tráfico y de impresiones servidas no fuera suficiente, existe un montón de matemática mal calculada. Un ejemplo es el número de hispanos en línea; ¿cómo se mide eso exactamente? ¿Alguna vez ha observado algún reporte acerca de las investigaciones de mercado de estos grupos? Donde n=800. ¿800 personas? ¿Es eso suficiente para extrapolarlo a los 43 millones de hispanos?

Pero, ¿por qué detenernos en las figuras de tráfico? ¿Qué tan sorprende es el hecho de que los editores no saben, ni cuentan con una buena manera de saber exactamente, quién hace parte de su audiencia? La gente siempre me pregunta cómo los editores pueden saber esta información, y siempre respondo que hay cuatro formas de hacerlo: tienen alguna forma de registrar o recolectar información, han hecho encuestas y extrapolado la información a todos los visitantes, una compañía de análisis ha examinado su sitio o usado un sistema de panel para extrapolar los atributos de la audiencia, o se la inventan. Eso es todo.

La realidad, o el terrible secreto, es que muchos editores no saben con certeza. Y pareciera que esta información haya sido eludida por la mayoría de agencias y anunciantes. No puedo contarle cuántos RFPs (solicitudes de propuestas) vemos, donde la agencia o el anunciante busca hombres de cabello castaño, de edades 18 a 25, interesados en autos, en Dakota del Sur, y que tienen solamente un hermano. Esa especificación es básicamente absurda y en la mayoría de los casos es intratable, ¿cómo puede saber si su audiencia tiene cabello castaño? Bueno el terrible secreto es que es igual de difícil determinar su edad.

En Consorte, nosotros preguntamos, preguntamos y preguntamos. Pero únicamente sabemos la información que se nos otorga. Ese el terrible estado de las medidas y los datos en el mundo de la publicidad en línea. El cual, considerando la fuente, es completamente decepcionante. ¡Se supone que una de las bellezas del Internet es su capacidad de medición!

Entonces, ¿cuál es la alternativa? El editor de Media Strategies, Jim Meskauskas, sugirió en un artículo reciente que los anunciantes y las agencias no deben de usar números. No estoy segura qué tan realista es esa sugerencia. ¿Qué opina usted?

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Dirty Little Secrets

June 26th, 2008

It’s no secret that I don’t come from an advertising background. I do come from a finance background but that still doesn’t explain my shock at what I’ve discovered in online advertising: nothing adds up.

Yes I said it. And it’s not a new subject apparently, just one many people don’t talk about. Such as publisher reach numbers and ad network reach numbers. None of them make sense. Why? Because server logs don’t equal Comscore or Quantcast or other third party methods. And it’s no wonder when you get behind the methods. Yet advertisers and agencies, with few options, are forced to rely on these third party stamps of approval. Therefore I have to pay tens of thousands of dollars just for a little dose of legitimacy – but it’s a farce – anybody can pay and the numbers mean nothing!

I mean does anybody find the fact that a major third party traffic analysis firm was grossly wrong about a large public company’s traffic numbers even slightly incredible?

Even the fact that different ad servers consistently come up with different numbers is enough to drive a person insane. Apparently each ad server has a different definition of “delivered.”

And if traffic numbers and ad serving impression numbers weren’t enough, there is a whole host of plain ol’ bad math. For example, the number of Hispanics online – how is that measured exactly?

Have you ever looked at the sample size of some of these research reports? Where n=800. 800 people? This is a sufficient sample size to extrapolate to the whole of 43 million Hispanics?

But why stop at traffic? How crazy is it that publishers don’t know nor do they have a good way of knowing who it is exactly that makes up their audience? People always ask me how publishers can know this information and I reply: four ways: they have a registration path where they collect the information, they’ve surveyed their audience and extrapolated to all visitors, a third party analysis company has surveyed their site or used the panel system to extrapolate to the publisher’s audience attributes or the publisher makes it up. That’s it.

The reality or dirty little secret is that many publishers don’t know for sure. And this information seems to have eluded most agencies and advertisers. I can’t tell you how many RFPs we see where the agency/advertiser is looking for brown-haired, males, aged 18-25, interested in autos, in South Dakota, with only one brother. The specificity can border on the absurd and in most cases is completely unaddressable – exactly how are you supposed to tell if your audience has brown hair? Well the horrible secret is that it’s just as hard to determine their age.

At Consorte – we ask, and we ask, and we ask. But we’re only as good as the information given to us. And that’s the horrible state of metrics and data in online advertising. Which considering the source is utterly disappointing. One of the beauties of online is its supposed measurability!

So, what’s the alternative? Media Strategies Editor Jim Meskauskas in a recent posting suggested that advertisers and agencies simply refuse to use the numbers. I’m not sure that’s realistic. What do you think?

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