The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Last Tuesday, our own Max Kalehoff co-moderated the SEMPO Digital Media Meetup with Sara Holoubek, SEMPO president.  Over one hundred members of the New York search-marketing community convened at Yahoo!’s offices to debate the intersection of online display and search advertising.

The premise: “As the fundamentals of search advertising push efficiency, automation, and performance, the worlds of display media and pay-per-click advertising are beginning to blur. Increasingly, display networks are focusing on performance as advertisers find value in evaluating search and display side-by-side.  This has resulted in media networks that have moved away from targeting content and are now targeting audiences via scientific optimization. But how are marketers to navigate the various solutions and tools performance-centric media networks offer? Is there opportunity search-marketers must act on now?”

The short answer is: it’s complicated.  But our all-star panel composed of Eric Weiller, CEO of 33Across, Scott Portugal from Traffiq, and Adam Heimlich from Razorfish, provided valuable insights. 

(From left to right: Adam Heimlich, Scott Portugal, Eric Weiller. Photo by Max Kalehoff.)

Panel Highlights

Scale
We opened our panel with a question on everyone’s mind: What is the critical mass of advertising volume needed in order to move the needle with display advertising? How much scale is required to drive performance? Search works in the niches, even with very small campaigns and businesses, but why is display different?

Eric Weiller agreed that display advertising requires hundreds of thousands of viewers to obtain the efficiencies required to see results. “Display advertising,” he said “works best on a large scale to a very segmented audience.” But Eric also noted that display media is frequently not given its due. Most advertising attribution models have a long way to go, and advertisers often do not assign value to display ads, leaving full credit to search and the last click before conversion.

Maximizing Display Investment
Even when marketers have the scale required to obtain results from display advertising, how are they to determine performance and then maximize investment?

Scott underscored third-party measurement data and tools for planning towards goals. “But after that,” Scott said “advertisers need to be ready to take the rigor of search advertising and apply it to display, and this includes having architecture in place to obtain real-time data. Advertisers should always be aware of their key performance indicators and baselines, and from there, they must test, locate jet streams of revenue, and re-invest.”

Display’s Convergence With Search
We concluded the panel by looking at the future of display, particularly its convergence with search on the marketer’s desktop.  Scott felt the shift was already happening, pointing to several online ad exchanges, tools like Clickable, and even Google AdWords. Adam gave a more conservative estimate of several years, underscoring many hurdles to overcome before display performance metrics could truly align with, and complement, search.

If you are interested in joining the New York SEMPO Meetup group, please visit the Meetup Web site.

Note: Some terms discussed at the Meetup event, as defined by Wikipedia.

Online Display Advertising – Appears on Web pages in many forms, including Web banners.  These banners can consist of static or animated images, as well as interactive media that may include audio and video elements.

Advertising Network – A company that connects Web sites looking to host ads with advertisers. There are several types of networks.  Representative networks provide full transparency to the advertiser about where their ads will run. Blind networks offer low pricing in exchange for marketers relinquishing control over where their ads will run. Targeted networks specialize in using consumer click stream data to enhance the value of the inventory they purchase.

Retargeting – Helps companies advertise to customers who visit a Web site but leave without converting. This is done by displaying ads to the prospect as they surf the Internet via various ad networks that the company buys media from.
 
Advertising Exchanges – Are technology platforms for buying and selling online advertising impressions, and represent a field beyond ad networks. Exchanges can be useful to both buyers and sellers because of the efficiencies they provide.