Fixing Ad Viewability: A Simple And Unacceptable Solution

On A Clear Day, I'm Getting Hosed

Item: In Q1 2015, view- ability rates for online ads on networks and exchanges, which is to say all non-direct digital ad inventory, which pretty much means a vast amount of programmatic and RTB placements, was...

(drumroll please)

41.8%.

Down from Q4's 42.6%.

Which means over 5 out of every 9 ads, ads that are presumably bought and paid for by advertisers, are never seen by a human.

(Source: Integral Ads Media Quality Report.)

The scary part of it is that the report is actually "good" news, in that the numbers are up about 5% from the worst numbers of 2014, with mobile and video viewability leading the charge. Mobile wins on this metric because it's downright difficult for ads within an app to not be viewable. Video wins because it's expensive enough to avoid the truly awful remnant inventory part of the market. Direct sales to publishers also score higher than exchanges and networks, which should surprise you not at all, and have only a quarter of the ad fraud issues.

Some of those unseen ad impressions are legitimate, of course. White hat robots are how search engines work. Not every ad impression in offline realms are viewable, especially in print. There's a very real possibility that viewability numbers for other ad mediums aren't so much better than, well, 4 out of 9.

But since you can measure digital, and watching just one video of a black hat machine in operation can make you crazy with rage, all of this smells of Capital F Fraud. So it's the hot button story for 2015, and the major threat facing the industry today.

Now, ready for the truly bad news?

The industry defines a viewable ad impression as one where the ad is at least 60% on screen, and resides there for over one second.

Does that seem viewable to you, Dear Reader?

Publishers and ad exchanges, of course, have a vested interest in not ratcheting up the standards, because it's just an added measure of self-punishment. But this is just not a sustainable product and standard, especially if you are trying to argue for any kind of branding benefit. Your ad was half on the screen, for the time it took you to blink your eyes three times. Pay up.

There's just one way out for this, and it's a brand of medicine that no one wants to take, but it's just this.

Fraud, and robots, never, ever move as slowly as people.

If viewability is defined as not 1, but 10, seconds on the screen, you will more or less end the issue. You'd also have a product that businesses and advertisers will want to buy. But the ad would have to stay around even on screen scroll and pan, which means that publishers would have to change their ways to accommodate it.

Finally, you'd have all kinds of legitimate traffic fail to register as an impression, because humans can, and do, reject content in less than ten seconds. (By the way, if they do, and it means the death of a lot of bad content sites? I think the world would be a better place, and we might see less clickbait or slideshow garbage. But I digress.)

Oh, and the CPMs involved would have to more or less multiply by a factor of 10.

Easier to just talk about native and mobile, right?

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Five Predictions For Mobile Ads, Based On A Life In Online Ads

300 Baud, Aw Hell Yeah

Some days, Dear Reader, I feel like I'm living in a movie. Or, more accurately, a remake. (See that sweet machine above the header? My first ride. Made money with it online, in 1985. No, seriously.)

Anyway... having made money from online advertising for the past 15 years, I've seen enough iterations to recognize patterns that will repeat. So here's five predictions about mobile that are really more about market forces, rather than the medium. Let's get into it.

1) Direct response will flatten

Every time someone invents a new way to advertise (expandable, mobile, native, video, etc.), sales for that method triumph the numbers as the New Best Thing, sure to eradicate older methods. And mobile has spiked higher than most, just because it's got the newness factor multiplied by the fact that it's much easier to respond in error. (Just consider if you've ever "butt dialed" anything on a laptop.)

But beyond UI issues, the history of response in a new platform or market is clear. You can get 10X CTR today by just showing your ad in China, and I guarantee you that there will be spectacular old-time response metrics in Cuba or North Korea when regime change makes interactivity commonplace. Mobile is the same. It will start hot, then flatten to a true level of responsiveness, and from there, the metrics will be more about deliverability and viewability, rather than the method.

So mobile response is a nice story now, but in the long term, it won't be any different than what we already know. T'was ever such, and will always be.

2) A new production standard for publishers and consumers will take over.

A small history lesson. Flash backed into being the de facto standard for online ad work, because HTML4 loaded in a piecemeal fashion, and Web connection speed used to be such a concern. (Still is, depending on where you are, and the quality of your Wifi. But I digress.) The other great problem with Flash is that it's backwards compatible, which means that it's increasingly insecure to black hat coding.

HTML5, the new standard that's more and more common on a daily basis (mostly because it plays nicely with mobile, and HTML4 does not) is said to not have the piecemeal loading issue. It also avoids much of the legacy coding problems, since it's only a few years old. For some time, some skeptics believed that publishers and back-end networks would prevent the transition, and that the long tail of Flash would run for years more. But with recent malware infestations in Flash coding, along with the clear and present advantages of easier video and mobile, that friction will be overcome. Besides, it's not as if anyone is still on dial-up.

3) The 80/20 rule will repeat (and it's more like 90/10).

Pity the poor coder and QA people. So many formats to check, and so little time to make sure they all work out! The only issue here is that sentence could have been said about browsers from 10+ years ago, email from 5+ years ago, or mobile today.

What will happen is that the industry will design for a handful of market share leaders (iPad, iPhone, Android), and give short shrift to less prevalent players. This will only change if and when the world changes. Coding and designing for a wide range of formats has never been an optimal way to work, and isn't going to start now.

4) Personalized creative will dominate.

At the start of the century, there was pushback about how behaviorally targeted ads were too personal, especially in sensitive categories like pharma and services. Five years ago, the same objections were brought up about dynamic retargeting and remarketing for e-commerce. Now, it's a question of cyber-stalking and geo-targeting causing a backlash on mobile.

The commonality is that information about the individual user, when utilized in the ad unit, is said to cross a line of privacy or propriety. While I'm sensitive to the fact that this does occur on the individual level, there's no great evidence that this is a mass public concern. Especially if frequency is capped, or the user has the ability to opt out of receiving similar messages.

In other words, it's similar to the many prediction of doom that have been set to social network advertising, and how those can't possibly keep making money, once everyone gets outraged and deletes their profile over privacy issues. There just isn't a special level of distaste for this kind of advertising, and there won't be in mobile, either. So the market will gravitate to it, for the simple reason that it works better.

5) Brand marketing benefits will continue to be disregarded.

This is such an ingrained attitude at the agency level that I just can't see it changing for another generation. The need to tell a story in long-form video in broadcast media, with high frequency, will go away once the data gets to the last mile of narrowcasting, and social media backlash might cause some brands to shy away from high repetition campaigns. But there's still something to be said for the security for brands in the 30-second slot during a must-see live event, and that reach and impact will continue to trump the drip-drip-drip saturation pattern of pre-roll spots over the diaspora of individual channels.

It hasn't mattered, up to now, that the Internet has been the only way to reach the affluent for the prime waking hours of their day (i.e., at work and cyberslacking). It hasn't mattered that mass broadcast audiences have continued to disintegrate, or that younger audiences are increasingly unlikely to ever be in front of that big set screen. Mobile will be like desktop/laptop, in that we will measure the metrics and share them with our clients. And if you can measure it, the brand marketing benefits are forgotten, because having the data just prevents any other thought pattern from coming to the surface. Maybe in another ten years.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

We Have A Winner

After a close and varied vote, we're going with the logo seen above. My thanks to everyone who reached out in email, on Facebook, on Linked In and through the registration form. Lots of good feedback and concern for the enterprise!

I've always been more of a direct than brand guy... but I'm very happy that the approach got such nice support. While we found a lot to like among all of the entrants, the slightly old-time human service quality that's reflected by our profile is a good reflection of the hands-on services and support that you'll receive.

Also, I own fedoras, and I'm not afraid to use them. Without irony. Let's get our Draper on for you.

More changes soon!

Focus Us Quickly

Folks... as you might have noticed, Change Is Coming to the blog, and the consulting business it represents. The first of which is that we're moving away from a personal blogging feel and URL, and more into a professional sheen. The second involves branding, and towards that end, I've asked a few members of my design network to take a quick crack at that work. I know which of the options below I prefer, but I'm not my prospect or client base; you folks are.

 Option 1 and 2

 Options 3 through 10

 Options 11, 12 & 13

 Options 14 & 15

 Option 16

So what I'd like you to do is give me your opinion on the logo options above, and email those to davidlmountain at gmail dot com. (Sorry for the typing need, but there are too many scraping bots for spammers.) I'm asking you to send me email, because I don't want to hold back on your comments, or subject the design team to quick and potentially dismissive feedback. (They get enough of that from me on a routine basis.) You can also use the form field at the top right of the page, if that's easier.

Oh, and do that ASAP, because putting it off and thinking too long about this will get you away from the mindset of a new prospect.

Thanks much!

6 Lessons From My Worst Pitch: A Marketing & Advertising Tale Of Horror

It Only Felt This Empty

Since the first in this series has been well-received, I think I'll make a habit of it. The point, as always, is to not work from fear... but to learn from every mistake. Besides, they make for the best stories later.

I've been fortunate enough to do a lot of different things in my career. In my early 20s, I was the lead singer / songwriter and manager of my own rock and roll band. The band was the focus of everyone involved for several years. We went through a lot of personnel, released four different collections of songs (tapes and CDs), made a video (link later) and T-shirts, and played several hundred club and showcase dates in a bunch of different areas. We were good enough to play a couple of major music industry trade shows, with South By Southwest, twice, being the biggest feathers in our cap. For a time, we all thought we were going to be signed and have a shot to do things at a national level. But the turnover and slowly dawning realization that while we were pretty good, our music was not absolutely essential to anyone's lives but our own, ended the dream. No regrets; I learned a lot. As you'll see.

My Worst Pitch Ever story came in the middle of our run. We were getting some radio play here and there, and some of that was coming from a college town about six hours from where we were based. I checked with my friends in other bands to see if they knew what the best room in town to play was, and if they had any leads on booking agents or venue owners to get us an opening slot. A venue was found, I smooth talked our way into an opening slot for a Saturday in August, and hey, we're in a new market. I went to work to try to get the radio station to promote our appearance, but didn't think too much about this, because the club booked us and I've been told it's a good venue, so everything should be fine. The day comes, and we gas up the van and go.

Six hours later, we pull up... and it's really nice. As in way too nice. We were a hard rock band, with elements of punk.

And it's crowded, with about a hundred people who are all ready for music. And they are also all about twenty to thirty years older than us, or anyone who has ever been to our shows.

We then checked out the headliner's gear, and they all had acoustic instruments and hand drums. Us? Not so much.

So the band looks at me, and I look at them... and we're faced with three not great options. Do we:

1) Turn down all of our instruments and play as quietly as possible, in deference to the headliner and their crowd, and fulfill our contractual obligations and slink out of town.

2) Play our normal set, because that's what we do best and have rehearsed, and maybe some in the crowd will respond well to it, and make our gas money back through CD and T-shirt sales.

3) Get back in the van without playing a note, because nothing in the next hour is going to be better than getting back into our own beds an hour faster than otherwise.

We chose Door Number Two.

I'm biased, of course, but I think we played great. We were tight, made no mistakes of note, had no technical problems, and looked every bit the part of an up and coming rock and roll band that was brimming with confidence and chops.

We also cleared the place of over 90% of its occupants in about a minute, with a scatter pattern that was like something out of an action movie.

* * * * *

Direct marketing lessons learned!

1) Never forget that your list is more important than your offer, or your creative.

I think we could have been the Rolling Stones that night, and it wouldn't have made a difference. We were just the wrong band, at the wrong volume. If you are selling to the wrong people, everything else is academic.

2) To thine own self be true.

We could have taken option #1 and made more friends with the club and the headlining act. It certainly would have been the more comfortable option on a personal level. And door number 3 might have been better for the headliner and venue.

But the plain and simple fact is that we were never going to get another gig at that venue, or have any relationship with the headliners. Twelve hours of driving and gas was a sunk cost. So the 10% of the crowd that stayed and bought a few CDs and T-shirts, and signed the mailing list, were everything to us. Besides, a good live hour of practice had value. (Also, if our watered-down set *had* worked, we could have easily gotten sidetracked into formats that we weren't as good at.)

3) If your creative is also your management, you may only be doing both jobs at 50% effectiveness.

As the manager, I should have done more due diligence on the venue or headliner. In fairness, this was a pre-Internet age, and  research was harder. Had I insisted on a phone call with the headliner to get a sense of what their audience was like, and if there was likely to be a fit, we might not have wasted the day. I could have delegated some of the pre-gig legwork, and should have.

4) Don't make a business decision for just one reason.

The booking agent for the venue should have, of course, done their homework and listened to my band's music before making the booking. But when presented with "new band for the area that's getting radio play", they didn't need to hear more, especially for a relatively low-pressure opening slot. On my end, I was so wrapped up in paying off the radio airplay story that I didn't realize it wasn't going to produce much in the way of headcount at the venue.

5) Timing matters.

If I had waited a month for the booking, we might have had a very different experience... because playing a college town in mid-August is not exactly a great way to reach a college-age audience. It also might have drastically changed the demographics of the room, or the nature of the headlining band.

6) Perform with no fear.

I've been fortunate enough to pitch to C-level execs in a wide range of consumer categories. Some of those have resulted in major business. Others have resulted in a swing and a miss. But in every one of those, I've remembered the Worst Pitch Ever before starting, slowed my breathing, and have never had too much of an issue with nerves.

Because no matter what happens, the people in my pitch meeting aren't going to walk out of the room with their fingers in their ears. Or throw beer, or make rude gestures and yell angry things, as they scatter.

In short, I've already gotten the worst presentation of my career out of the way.

And it didn't kill me.

So why be afraid of any presentation that, by definition, will be better than one I've already had?

* * * * *

The promised music video link, I'm the guy getting burned at the stake. Good times.

You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

And I'd love to hear your worst pitch in the comments below...

Launch Day!

Connecting In a Provider-Centric Way

Today saw the birth of Telltale Health, the brainchild of Zach Gursky. I worked with Zach a decade ago at a previous start up, and he was kind enough to seek me out. The site is a good v1, with some solid image finds (we had to dig deep to avoid cliche in this category, as it's all royalty-free images and overfarmed), and works just as well on your mobile or tablet. That's not a small thing, especially now that Google is moving to mobile-first SEO, and an opportunity for many in the field to help put the spurs into long-standing and stagnant products to upgrade the old Web site.

As for Telltale's business prospects moving forward? It's the best kind of business idea, in that it takes a proven innovation and applies it to an industry that's a little behind the times in terms of optimal practices.

Anyway, check it out if you like. It's been a bit of a challenge to get it all done, but that's the way of these things. No such thing as a painless delivery.

Relax. The IoT Is Going To Make Online Advertising Much, Much, Better.

Sunrise or Sunset? It's Your Call

If you've paid attention to our industry recently, you've seen all kinds of very unfortunate developments. There are big concerns about viewability. Malware is sneaking into new places, creating exceptional risks. CPMs are plunging for publishers, penetration levels dropping in key demographics. SEO is threatened by full automation and click fraud. Email is Dead. Copyright piracy is on the rise.

It's a wonder anyone can get out of bed.

But I've always been the kind of marketer and advertiser that prefers executing a positive message (Hope) over a negative one (Fear). So it comes as no surprise that I can't wait for New Tech and New Ways to make our lives better. And that's why I'm hyped for the Internet of Things (IoT), the blanket statement given to non-traditional devices getting online access.

In a slight paradox, I'm probably also going to be the last guy on my block to actually install a Web-connected fridge and smarthome tech (I have kids and pinch pennies). But who am I as a consumer isn't what's going on in the market. And the IoT is going to make our lives as marketers and advertisers much more interesting and effective. Let's get into the reasons why.

1) More data means less irrelevant messaging. 

Any grown woman who is reading this can, in all likelihood, rattle off the names of several prescription medications that she will never, ever purchase for her own use. Any grown man can do the same with hygiene products. On an everyday basis, especially in dense populations, we are drowning in advertising messages that are, at best, useless to the individual, and wasteful to the advertiser. At their worst, they are in placements that actively discourage use or encourage ridicule. And since the attention paid on all of these ads is constantly on the decline, because they are not relevant... well, you've got to show more. Tragedy of the commons writ large. In an IoT world, we just might be able to get to a point where the data starts to close out poorly placed ads. (Yes, I'm an ad and marketing pro who dreams of a world with fewer ads.)

Several SaaS providers are already offering the promise of single-casting ads in broadcast based on data from the user's web use, or from additional sources. So, taking this down to the individual level, maybe the fact that I'm a homeowner, father and husband who watches pro sports and lives in the suburbs (i.e., prime target for financial services and big family-friendly cars)... will finally get synched to the data that also says that I own a hybrid hatchback, multiple bicycles, and adopted CFC light bulbs as soon as they were available. Working from that data, perhaps my ad feed is best served not with truck ads and horror movie trailers, and more with fast food and the latest from Disney/Pixar. But the impact doesn't stop with better ads on just one screen.

2) Less irrelevant messaging makes for more interesting campaign choices.

Once we've eliminated the waste from those distribution campaigns, you and I will have many more choices as to what to do with our budgets. Maybe you put more into creative, and develop "Easter Egg" content for your site about your movie, and a guerrilla campaign that gets the word out. If we're selling trucks, maybe we invest more in co-pro campaigns at lifestyle events, or just pass the potential savings from the more effective spend into a better price point, or give our dealers more incentives in financing and rebates. Maybe both companies just pocket the difference and pay their employees or shareholders more. In any event, we've got a better situation than today.

3) Routine chores get easier for consumers, and advertising becomes more of a service.

The knee-jerk reaction to the IoT is that no one wants to get email from their freezer. But on the consumer level, I can't tell you how many times I've been at the grocery store, staring down a 2-for-1 deal on some of the stuff my family eats on a routine basis, and not knowing if we've already got it, or if there will be room for it once I get home. And sure, I could plan better, or just buy less, but wow, that's a great price, and everyone in the house loves this. So in it goes, for good or ill. Or I wind up making multiple trips. The IoT, as imagined here, is saving me money and time, cutting down on local traffic, lessening demand on the infrastructure, and so on. And that benefit scales.

Now, let's return that to the advertiser. In the example above, the refrigerator is connected to the smartphone, and helps to populate my grocery list (let's say, by an app developed by the store chain). The app then has the ability to offer coupons for products in super-targeted categories, in real-time... and also, to learn from past data, so that less attractive offers are filtered out. I'm still getting ads, but only for what I want to buy, and when I want to buy it. (A small aside: one of my past start ups provided just this sort of opportunity for marketers at the PC level. Our response rates, and CPM, were absolutely phenomenal. But I digress.)

4) The true market is revealed.

Want to make an online advertising pro grind their teeth? Talk about Super Bowl ad pricing. But at the end of the day, it's difficult to prove that one ad format is "better" than the other, because the online ad has near total data accountability and little brand appeal, while the latter is more or less completely flipped.

Now, consider a full IoT world, where marketers can connect viewer data from the screen. The fridge reads the bar codes on CPGs. The car can track to various locations. Information flows from the laptop, smartphone and tablet, and it all connects. Slowly but surely, we can start to get a much more complete picture of what ads are working, and which ones are not... for more than next-day recaps of which ad was funny, or touching, or, well, whatever.

Data analysis is its own reward. Connections serve to inspire further concepts and ideas. And while there are substantial privacy hurdles to overcome, and a great deal of permission to acquire and "last mile" pipe to install, the rewards are too great to ignore. The IoT, if done correctly and with enough policing to ensure that good faith efforts succeed over black hat types, will make our world more efficient on time, money, and resources... while also giving marketing and advertising pros better and more engaged audiences.

We can, of course, turn this into a "Blade Runner" / "Minority Report" dystopia of constant intrusion and irrelevance. Poor choices that lead to frequency cap abuse for high value categories, or "cyberstalking" concerns around sensitive products or categories, are going to happen, as part of the warts and all rollout that occurs with any development.

But when I see those future dystopia images, they seem a lot more like what we endure today, rather than what we will enjoy tomorrow.

Sunrise, not sunset. Hope, not Fear.

It's a better product to sell.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Media Buy Musings: Jon Stewart, ESPN, and The Vanishing Youth

Not Shown: Salaries

A couple of seemingly unrelated news items about media... which seem related to me, and might have impact to those who live with media buys in broadcast. Let's go down the rabbit hole.

1) Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show... and also, Samantha Bee and Jason Jones for their own shows on TBS, and, presumably, a host of other lesser-known but wildly important talent that will take the opportunity to follow Bee/Jones and/or Stewart, if he finds something new to keep himself busy. Stewart will be replaced by relatively unknown young comic Trevor Noah.

As a routine viewer of TDS, I love and am going to miss Stewart, the same way that I love and now miss Stephen Colbert. But where I used to watch Colbert every night, now I'm pretty much watching "The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore"... which is probably a net win in the long run for Comedy Central, since Wilmore, especially in Year One, should cost a lot less than Colbert Year Nine. So   from a pure blood and dollars standpoint, I have to wonder if Comedy Central might be thrilled, in the long term, to watch him go. Here's why.

Stewart, by dint of his ability to attract a scale audience of wildly attractive young viewers with affluent / college demographics, was making up to $30 million a year from that chair. One has to assume that Jones, Bee and the other emigres were also making nice salaries, given their seniority with the program.

Noah's salary is currently undisclosed... but would anyone be very surprised to hear if he were making as little as 10 to 20% of what Stewart was making? Even at, say, $2 million annually, that would be an opportunity that any young comic worth his salt would leap at. It might also be why Comedy Central had a seeming lack of interest in going after a major name (Tina Fey was many people's dream host)... which also migh speaks to a certain confidence that the network has in the franchise's backhone -- aka, the writing and production staff -- can keep it going at, say, 90 to 95% of the current ratings. And maybe for a whole lot less, or maybe just less, with the remaining staff getting hefty raises for loyalty.

In any event, cutting costs makes a lot of urgent sense who you read that...

2) ESPN is having major issues with Verizon for a "skinny" package that excludes the channel.

According to the Wall Street Journal, every monthly subscriber to cable television in America paid an average of $6.04 per month, or $72.48 a year, for the sports channel. That's over 4X more than they pay TNT, the runner-up in this measurement, and 6X more than Fox News. Coupled with the likely inclusion of ESPN2 on most plans, and Bristol took home over $81 a subscriber last year. Rates are expected to rise by over 39% in the next two years (!).

How have they managed to pull this off? Simple; every other smaller network has been losing ground, and non-sports viewers are simply getting less for more. Which makes Verizon's move a simple matter of economic self-interest in pricing a commodity. Offer a lower priced version which strips out the big ticket piece, and keep the non-sports viewers who might otherwise cut cable entirely.

Up to now, ESPN has been basic despite its cost... and that's absolutely critical, because if the network had to rely solely on the people who watch it for sustenance, the estimated cost would be $37 a month.

Now, it's possible that the network has its hooks that deep into America's sports fans that it could survive on its own, and that the public would simply make it an either/or choice of ESPN or Rest Of Cable. (The average cable bill is, BTW, a little less than $55 a month for everything.) But if and when that happens, you'd have to think there would be some collateral damage for Comedy Central to not keep it's current TDS ratings... or for ESPN to stop being such an attractive source of new to file consumers, since there would be a whole lot less casual viewers at a 6X price jump from the current rate.

Which leads me to the final point....

3) A study last week showed that viewership for TV across the board is down 11% in the US, 13% worldwide, and 33% (!) in the "seed" generation of 14 to 17 year olds.

I don't think it's all about watching stuff on your own screen, or not being in the big TV room with your parents, or preferring short attention span theater of Vine, YouTube and Hulu, though that's clearly a big part of it. I think, instead, that there's a growing and seismic change in the way that cable television is disseminated and paid for, an that the industry is sacrificing long-term stability for short-term profiteering. And that today's younger demos, strapped for cash with weak employment markets, high education costs and an increasing wariness of debt, are not very likely to just go along and pay the freight.

So, rolling this back to the beginning... did Stewart jump, or was he pushed?

And if he was pushed, were ESPN's fingerprints found at the scene of the crime, or did the kids do it?

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

More With The Dead Ads

Rock On, Display Ads

Busy week for this meme...

From Media Post: "Akamai will team with Adobe Primetime to market a server-side dynamic ad insertion solution... The server-side ad insertion idea lets ad insertion intergrate easily into content delivery and takes processing the ads and content away from the player. In theory at least, that thwarts some ad blocking devices... The new system gets to the beta phase in the second quarter of 2015." 

So... pretty much what we were talking about earlier in the week. Ads coming back, like the tides, in places without banner blindness, with more of a native approach. Viewability spikes, and in all likelihood, CTR and all of the other data that people use to denigrate the medium.

Or, if you want to go shorter: Toothpaste doesn't go back in tubes, once it's out. 

Especially when the toothpaste in question (display ads on the Web) is 20 years old.

TV Ads Are Dead, DEAD, DEAD!, I Tell You

Welcome, TV Ad Brothers & Sisters

In a new survey, Accen- ture says there was a 13% drop world wide and an 11% decline in the United States. Even looking at live TV viewing -- specifically at sports programming -- there have been cutbacks in usages on the traditional TV screen, 10% globally and 9% in the U.S. - MediaPost, 4/15/15

So, as someone who has made the rent in digital advertising (banners, emails, social, SEO, etc.) for the past couple of decades....

And has had to endure any number of post-mortems and sloppy attacks based on CTR and banner blindness and deliverability issues and so on, and so on...

While my brethren in television got to enjoy ever-escalating (or, at the very least, wonderfully stable) CPMs...

While my own field's willingness to provide data, that was then used to club us over the head and shoulders, in re penetration...

Well, Goose, Sauce, And Gander math does seem to apply here, no?

Especially when the Accenture survey gets *really* bad (up to 33% loss!) for the 14 to 17 year old market?

Anyway... don't worry, TV Friends. As the last couple of decades in my own personal situation can attest, there's money in dead things.

Creative or Grenade: A Marketing & Advertising Tale Of Horror

Like This But Less Fun

Stay in the marketing and advertising game long enough, and you're going to have some bad days. Here's what I learned from one of my worst. Hopefully, it will benefit you, in the long run, as much as it has me.

In one of my first marketing jobs in my '20s, I worked for a custom music manufacturer as my day job, while trying to get signed as the leader of a rock and roll band in my nights and weekends. One of the manufacturer's best lead generation devices was a technical book for recording studios. It was great info, and absolutely free, but you had to give up your name, and it wouldn't be of any value to you, unless you had a recording studio. Genius marketing, and one of the company's best long-term generators of high quality leads.

Looking to replicate that success, I pitched management on a new book, one that I would write, which would be for indie bands when they were outside of the studio. I pulled together everything I had learned (the hard way) about booking gigs, selling merch, gaining radio play, working with managers and attorneys, and what to look out for in regards to recording company deals. I enlisted co-workers to share what they knew, got a great design from one of our in-house people... and then the hard part really began. . 

The biggest point for me, in making the book, was to get distribution and publicity that we didn't have to pay for. So I started pitching mail order music instrument vendors on a co-promotional marketing deal. Slip a postcard advertising our book into your shipments of recording studio equipment. In return, we'll give you signage on the book and other considerations, and we'll get access to fresh leads. As we were one of the bigger players in our space, with nationwide service and a constant presence at trade shows and talent showcases, we were able to work out a deal with one of the bigger providers. It took a lot of time and negotiation, but the deal happened, and now I needed to get my management to sign off on production.

Since the vendor sold a great deal of gear, and since it's difficult to say with complete certainty what gear will be used in a studio and which will not, we had to print and ship a truly intense amount of postcards... across the country, at our cost, and for an unknown quality of leads. To try to limit the outlay, we ran the job on remnant paper, got our in-house people to shepherd the job piecemeal, and shipped a year's worth of postcards (the final count was, I believe, over seven figures) out by cheap and slow freight. All told, the project took nearly six months from start to finish, and was a major undertaking for a lot of people. 

The postcard dropped. Our call center began to ring. Mail started to pile up.

And that's when we finally, awfully, tragically discovered... that one of the three inclusions of our phone number, on the postcard, was wrong. (A 3, when it was supposed to be an 8.)

The wrong number turned out to be for an unused department of an insurance company in Canada. Missing the typo wasn't just on me, since there was a half dozen people on the project. There was no way to fix the problem with fresh print, as we were already into our busy season, and there was no printing capacity, or management interest, in doing a reprint. But this was my baby, so I just owned it. I took full responsibility, apologized, and thought about offering my resignation.

My manager then took the opportunity to be great. He talked me down out of my panic, got on the horn with the insurance company, and worked out a manufacturing trade for them to transfer the number to us for a couple of years. Within a couple of weeks, the wrong number was ringing in our call center.

To finish the story... we fixed the film for any future reprints. The insertion turned out to be a mixed bag, as the cost per lead was low, but so was the quality of the prospects. And I learned to stare down creative for errors as if I were checking a mine field, for the rest of my life. Because, well, that's really what they are.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Five Ways To Avoid Unproductive Creative Tests

You Need Better Outcomes

If you are running any kind of campaign with a direct marketing focus, it can be difficult for creative pros to set up an execution strategy that leads to, well, some place actionable. So let's get into the weeds of how to do this, in a way that won't just beat your control, but give you true learning points to use in the future.

1) The data likely has noise in it. Drown that noise with data.

I'm old enough to have learned my direct marketing in direct mail, which is to say, postcards, selling letters and catalogs... and the principles have served me well in the past 15 years of online work. So here's a quick history lesson for everyone who didn't start their career with the Post Office.

In classic (aka, offline) direct marketing, you'd split your lists in equal segments, making sure to control for a host of variables that could skew your results. Then, you'd pour enough sends into every cell to get to statistical significance, and in general, not learn anything actionable for months, or even entire business quarters, especially if you were working in niche consumer categories. It was slow and could cost you real money for failure, because it all took time and money, especially when you factored in postage and printing... but it also instilled a certain amount of discipline. No one expected or trusted fast results, unless the data truly overwhelmed any possible bias. Taking your time, and making sure to make every test count, was critical.

I love online work for the speed and economy, but it also tends to inspire compromised and sloppy work, especially when it comes to list segmentation. If you are trying to test, for instance, banner ads, you really shouldn't trust any data that doesn't reach into six figures at least... because the response rates are so low due to banner blindness and viewability issues. With rare events ruling the day, you also can't get great splits for things like recency, daypart, or protecting against click or impression fraud, especially if you are still working with remnant inventory.

Let's not get too depressed about this, because testing can and still needs to be done... but you should bring in your math hat for significant data on what you are really measuring (conversions, hopefully). You might still need to run this for weeks. Plan accordingly, and resist the temptation to cheat the process or declare an early "winner."

2) Test single variables, but make sure they are actionable.

Far too many creative pros will generate a multi-variate plan that tries to build incremental gains on small beer points -- a blonde model instead of a brunette, a round call to action button over a square, light animation against static, and so on, and so on. What usually winds up happening is a small array of results that is then used to create a Frankenstein ad of "optimal" practices... that winds up failing because, well, the ad is a Frankenstein, with too much clutter or disparate elements that contradict each other. There's a better way to go about this.

The key is to make sure that your variables are points that speak to greater learning. This is usually best done at the offer header level, where no offer goes against a low and middle price point (say, branding only vs. free shipping at a minimum order value vs. percentage off for some multiple of the free shipping price point). This simple test gives you clear information on how the v2 ad set should work, based on what segment of the market is providing you the best ROI. If it's premium price, maybe it's time to revisit your fonts, product photography, or call to action. If it's the free shipping offer, the same calculation happens in reverse. If neither offer is working more than the branding only approach, that says something powerful about your brand, which should also inspire your creative team for the next execution. And so on.

The big point is to make sure that your test (a) drives a real difference, and (b) that the difference is exploitable at a strategic marketing level. This can't be stressed enough; testing for the sake of testing, with no "next move" contingency thought process, is simply an irresponsible use of resources.

3) When in doubt, test tactically.

At past start ups in behavioral, email and retargeting, I concentrated on testing points that were more structural than creative, because the gains were far more likely to reappear in subsequent cells. In behavioral, this meant creating "utility" style ads that generated real functionality, like multiple landing page entry points, "second chance" offers that upped the ante when the user looked likely to close or ignore the offer, or tight splits in recency to say something more targeted to the past 7 day, or past 15 day, user. You get the idea. In email, tactical testing revolved around fairly pedestrian concerns like file size, daypart, mobile platform or different ways to express graphic relevance. In retargeting, monitoring competitor ads for format options, adding functionality that generally wouldn't be used in run of network approaches, and varying the aggressiveness of the offer for lapsed users, or providing social network soft entry points, all had their place.

In all of these cases, a winning test was something that led to not just a new approach for v2, but a more optimal way to consider the entire next line of attack. Tactical moves are far more likely to be universal, and have far more staying power, than this season's hot image or copy.

4) Innovate with relevance.

When you live in a consumer category long enough, control ads can feel almost oppressive, especially if they are in consumer categories with high turnover. Take, for instance, life insurance. It's something that people generally don't think about until a major life event, such as childbirth or a change in family status, and consequently, it indexes very highly, for new to file consumers, in the 25 to 40 year old New Parent market. From a creative perspective, this meant that all of the ads, for a good long while at a previous start-up with a high number of insurance providers, looked the same. A family of four, nuclear, mildly affluent, maybe with a dog to soften the image, and the kids are young. They're walking on a beach, and if you lived in this consumer category during the time that I did, you probably saw the same royalty-free image on a half dozen providers.

There's nothing wrong with a winning control... except that all controls fade with effectiveness over time, and there's always the feeling that you can do something better, especially in direct. So my team would scour royalty-free image banks to find new and better images that were in the same vein, maybe in different settings, or with different demographics. Performance plateaued, until I tried a new image approach. In this case, I went away from the family, and focused on the couple. And in a new winning control, a pregnant couple. It worked, and we had an entirely new way of looking at the category, since the truth of the matter was that the prospects in life insurance are usually in market before the kids are grown.

That sort of thinking has borne fruit in any number of categories in my career, and will likely work for you as well. It usually shows up in brainstorm sessions when you know everything about your market backwards and forwards, but maybe aren't seeing the forest for the trees. So innovate, but in an approach that's still relevant. (And by all means, always test that innovation against your control. There's as many cases when a bright idea didn't work, as when it did.)

5) Look beyond your day to day.

Many marketing and advertising pros who live in a single consumer category become truly spectacular experts in said category, and know everything that their competitors are doing, what they've done before, and where the market is likely going to be in the next few business quarters. But what they tend to miss is that there are fallow fields of knowledge in plays that reach the same audience, but in different consumer categories.

I'll bring this back to another real-life example from a past start up. One of our consistent consumer categories was online education, which indexed highly, in the time period in question, towards urban women, 25 and under. The demographic wasn't particularly affluent, which meant that many providers just went for a representative model, placed her in a campus setting, spoke to how fast and easy it was to get a degree that led to a better paying job, and called it a day on the creative.

What they didn't realize was that this exact same demographic was also being targeted extensively for online personals. Since my company saw the data from all tests and worked in many categories, this led to discovery and visibility moments that I was able to bring into my team's day to day.

So instead of showing overly excited models in campus settings -- not the online experience, or representative of the value of the offer -- our ads worked off what was working for this demo in personals. To wit, serious relationships, meaningful connections, and longer copy that spoke to serious commitments and life-changing events. Our education ads moved away from degrees fast or get a high paying job quick concepts, and more into how the value of a degree would span decades of earning potential. The concept wasn't an unequivocal success, as the campaigns in question tended to drive less response, but higher conversion. They weren't right for every client in the category, and we made sure to share that knowledge with top tier clients.

The takeaway for creatives was clear, though. If you pay attention to what's working for your audience outside of your category, it could really inspire a meaningful creative test. And could make you seem like much more of a Creative Genius than you may actually be. :)

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Six Marketing Tips From... My Home Poker Game?

Happiness, at least pre-flop

One of the most successful long-term programs I've ever been involved with has, well, very little to do with my life as a marketing and advertising pro. And it might spur some good thinking for your own campaign. But first, a little personal background, as to why I developed this hobby.

I grew up in Philadelphia, PA, then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for an opportunity in 1999. In 2006, I got an offer from an old manager to join her at a NYC start up. As CA home prices were dooming us to a life of rentals, I took the offer, and bought a home near a train station between Manhattan and Philly. But as we had never lived in this area before, and our friends in our old home town were still pretty far away, we felt a little rootless and lonely at the start.

That's where the poker game came in. I invited friends from Philly, co-workers from New York, and the handful of people we knew in the area, and got a half dozen people to fill a table in my basement. That was in 2008, and that one-time event has now turned into once every three weeks, and one table into three or four, and a cold unfinished basement into a place people really enjoy. The game keeps growing and getting better, despite casinos opening in the area, and New Jersey players now being able to play all kinds of poker, at all hours, online. So why has it worked?

1) We found a niche.

Most home games are for very low stakes, which means that players don't take the game too seriously, and might graduate to something that keeps them more focused. At my game, we continually strive to keep things at a true middle, where no one ever loses too much, but the winners take home enough to make the day a good one.

Similarly, most home games only play one kind of poker (Texas Hold'Em, the one you are most likely to see on TV), and for similar stakes every time out. At my game, you'll find variations (Omaha, Pineapple, "bounty" events, and some other fairly unique rules) from time to time, which makes it very different from any other game I know. We still mostly play straight up hold'em, but the other offerings keep the main game fresh.

2) Know what you are not... but learn what you can.

If you are a big-time player, some of the biggest poker action in the country is still in Atlantic City, which isn't that far of a drive from where I live. As I mentioned before, there's also legal online play. And in all of these options, you'll find cutthroat play from players who might test your patience with questionable behavior or language, stakes that might put your standard of living at risk, and players who make their living from grinding away on non-professionals. You also won't find a lot of banter, running jokes, or players that are likely to become good friends outside of the game.

What you will find at my place, however, is similar tournament software, chips, cards, chairs, snacks and drinks -- because while I'm not the kind of guy who plays in casinos too often, I am the kind of marketer who is always looking to see what others in my consumer category are doing. And what I can emulate, or maybe even do better.

Oh, and here's another key point: while the game is for middle stakes, we still have a relatively big money event at the end of every year, because we squirrel away a portion of every tournament pot to a Player of the Year prize. If you win that, you get your name on the wall, and a pot that will make for a very merry holiday season. Which also encourages everyone involved to not skip events, since consistent attendance is pretty much required, along with good play and luck, to taking down that prize.

3) Empower evangelists... but with control.

If you are a regular at my game, and you bring a new player, you get a portion of your tournament fee waved... but only if that new player is invited back to play again. (Remember what I said about people with questionable behavior at the table? Life's too short to play poker with folks like that. Especially in my home.) The actual cost to the game for this policy? Nothing, since it just means the overall pot is a little smaller. The actual benefit to the game? Tremendous, because...

4) You always have to grow the list, even to just stay the same size.

Capacity at my room is capped, because there just isn't room for more. And we're getting closer and closer to filling that, but still haven't... because some people are going to move, or stop coming to the game for all sorts of reasons. So... it's like any other marketing campaign, in that some part of the list is always going offline. Which means that I've got to...

5) Commit to marketing research.

Every year, I survey my players with an anonymous online customer satisfaction poll, and measure the results on all of the things I've tried. I've gotten actionable feedback on things that people aren't usually comfortable with bringing up in person, or what they've seen and liked at other games. And the simple fact that I ask for this feedback, rather than just drop the terms of the game on players, makes them feel like this is their game, and something they are truly invested in.

6) Legal compliance matters.

 I run what is known as a "social game". My game takes no percentage or "rake" of the pots, charges nothing for admission or seats, and I happily report all gambling wins (and less happily, losses) on my tax returns. My players know each other, and the "house" holds no advantage over any other player. We also don't play for high enough stakes to cause trouble, and haven't ever had a noise issue with the neighbors. So while running the game has some risks (in that all endeavors in life carry some risk), I've done the homework to lessen mine.

One final point on all of this... while my game has nothing to do with my professional life, it has also done it no end of good. Because you'd be amazed at just how much business can crop up around a table when people are having a good time, and appreciating the care you put into creating a good customer experience. And just how much you care about sweating the details...

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

DMt's Law: If Something Is Dead, It's Probably Just Your Argument

"Display Ads Are Dead" - Clickbait header in my LinkedIn feed

Are you familiar, Dear Reader, with Godwin's Law? (Allow me to poach from Wikipedia to advance the narrative.) 

Godwin's Law is an Internet adage that basically says that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of someone involved in the discussion to try to "win" the argument by comparing their opposition to Nazism or Adolph Hitler. It's basically a sign that you can't win the argument on the merits, so you're just upsetting the table with the Hitler card and stomping off to your room.

I'd like to introduce a Godwin's corollary, and make it specific to online marketing, which is this: if a columnist says that a medium or a format is Dead, please feel free to step away from the clickbaiter and get on with the rest of your day. Because banner ads have been "dead" for most of the past two decades, along with email, and in the past five years, the desktop / laptop, video pre-roll, and I guarantee you within the next three to five years, remarketing / retargeting, blogging, native ads and anything else that shows signs of being a mature product.

I don't mean to just shrug off the issues in display. Viewability should be seen as a massive and necessary correction to the absurd notion that advertisers should pay for ads that are not seen by a human. (By the way, this also applies to the idea that ads need to be "above the fold." No, no, a thousand times, no. They have to be on sites where below the fold is, well, still seen by a human. It's a relatively simple matter of measuring time per page view, since fraud never moves slowly. But I digress.) Banner ads are 20 years old, and no direct marketing medium, especially online, should be as responsive after twenty years. That's not how direct marketing works, at least online, and if you are just looking at CTR, I'd like you to turn in any technology you own that isn't native to the year 2000, because your thinking hasn't advanced, and you don't deserve better than a Palm Pilot.

The plain and simple fact of the Internet hasn't changed, because it's the same as a law of business, or physics; someone's going to pay for it. While there are always small escapes from this as different entities try to gain mindshare or market share, gravity always returns, and will *always* return, because This Is Capitalism. 

Online ads may go from three main sizes to twenty different ones. They may incorporate video, or wrap content, or dance the line with content so much that no consumer will be able to tell the difference. They may play peekaboo in ways that irritate, or you may pay to make them go away, or find some tech shortcut... but the ads will return, like the tides. 

Why? Because they work. If you run an A/B test of groups that see them (and yes, truly see them, that viewability thing matters) against those that do not, the groups that see them respond more, buy more, know the brand more. Even if they never, ever, ever click. 

And if you really are guiding your marketing and advertising decisions by CTR-based analysis or clickbait headers or trend pieces, rather than your own data and spreadsheets and testing and ROI...

Well, your career might show up under that Dead header, too. 

But with much stronger odds of being accurate.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Why FBX Isn't Getting Clicks

From CTR Pioneers Ren & Stimpy

File this one under the "Of Course" section... Facebook has chopped a dozen-odd companies from the public-facing section of its FBX partner list, while seemingly reallocating assets and focus to its more mobile-facing Website Custom Audiences project.

The astute reader will be shocked, shocked to learn that click-through rates for the FBX program have been "abysmal", with response rates diving down, down, down to the regions seen by, well, every other publisher providing space for every other static retargeting ad on every other Web site in every other country. 

If only we could find the magical advertising opportunity that consumers pay the same amount of attention to, year after year!

And the fact that CTR for FBX is following the exact same pattern that every other new online advertising rollout has followed, for the past 20+ years that online advertising has rolled out, shouldn't keep Charlie Brown from, this time for sure, kicking that football. 

The mobile screen is so personal! (Just like the laptop was in 2000.) The ads are going to be so limited and relevant! (Until the CTR goes down, and publishers squeeze more in, because the law of diminishing returns doesn't count, for, um, some reason. I guess. If you are feeling crude, this is where you can reference drug abuse.) Dynamic content ensures the user will care! (Unless the data is outdated, or misreading the consumer's actual intent, the way it has for declining CTR in remarketing ads since, well, remarketing was introduced. In 2006.)

Meanwhile in advertising mediums that don't provide enough data to be punished, Super Bowl ad rates remain ever-growing, outdoor and radio and print still exist in CPMs that aren't race to the bottom, and no one has to worry about the 30 to 50% viewability issue involved due to bots, malware and the like.

So what's a lead generation professional to do?

Well, if you're smart enough to learn from your mistakes, you try to stop caring about CTR, and care only about conversion. You accept that it's a losing game over time, but that there's money to be made in the right spots, with the right offer and creative. You keep your eyes and ears open for the next short-term boost, and react with measured acceptance when you can to things like new screens, or native. You remain skeptical to anyone's claims of boosting CTR, since that just opens up the door to a host of abuses.

And you wait, patiently or not, for better tools to make this increasingly primitive way of doing business to pass into the dustbin of history, and for people to get sophisticated enough to understand that clicks don't matter. Purchases do. 

And that there are a lot of different ways, beyond See Ad Click Ad, to get to purchase.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Speed Brainstorming: three techniques to jump start creative

A New Path

Trying to come up with new creative executions that move the needle is, of course, what direct marketing and creative pros do on a daily basis... but that doesn't mean it's easy, especially if you seem to have reached a performance plateau. Here's a few tactics that might come in handy when you need to revisit well-worn ground.

1) Individually visualize your target.

It's one thing to know your audience at a demographic level, but that rarely produces creative breakthroughs. So instead of thinking about what might work for, say, 18 to 34 year old men in urban markets who are interested in sports for an apparel play, name your guy. Put some touch points on a white board as to what music he listens to, what car he drives, where he went to school, the beer he drinks, what sites or books or magazines that he reads, the apps on his phone, and so on, and so on.

When you take a few minutes to put some flesh on the skeleton and to start thinking about people outside of the abstract, you will be in a much better position to do great work. By the way, taking this exercise to the extreme of decorating an entire room as the bedroom of your ideal target, then having brainstorming sessions in that room? That's what the very expensive agencies do. As a matter of routine practice.

2) Moments of charity.

I once had a project to develop tests against the control for short-term financial services in acquisition email. (Not the cleanest of consumer categories, admittedly, but sometimes you don't get to choose your clients.) The winning controls all looked like lottery or sweepstakes creative, with fans of cash and speed messaging making everything in the category look interchangeable.

From the client's demographic materials and feedback, we learned the true reasons why lenders went for the service, and they were far more responsible than you might gather from the art. So we made work that swapped in children receiving medical care, cars getting fixed, and happy families reuniting from the use of the service. The copy changed as well, and the project created new controls, with a promising new way to engage with the prospects.

The bigger point for me, from this exercise, was to have a moment of charity for why a prospect would engage with a service. Once again, it just led to better work.

3) Graphical relevance with visual innovation

When testing against a control, it's important to realize why the control is working. In an exercise with working in the life insurance vertical, research showed winning art across the category that showed families with young children. So the reason why the ads worked was fairly obvious, since you don't really think about life insurance, for the most part, until you have kids. Hence, why the controls all looked the same.

Our next move was to try pieces that, more or less, tried to reach the prospect at an earlier but still valid place in the buying cycle -- so, pushing a baby stroller, holding a newborn in a hospital, and so on, and so on. Once again, the exercise allowed us to exceed the control, and to also develop a wide range of creatives that gave us more room without succumbing to creative wearout.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.

Online Ad Strategy for Busy Creative Pros: 3 Sites To Know

I Need This Button

I don't know about your experience and process, but for me, the art of making online ads has always been something of a rush -- literally.

Other disciplines may have time to come up with unique concepts, cast for models, select a director, check out different locales and photographers and the like.

In online, what usually happens is that you need to have this art by that date, or something bad is going to happen. (By the way, that date? Really would be better if it were three days sooner.) And with the explosion of formats for mobile and audience splits for behavioral targeting, the time to turn something new and distinct in creative isn't getting any slower.

But just because you are going fast and hoping to skip the usual and correct steps of branding and background documents, client meetings, demographic analysis, storyboard and mocks... doesn't mean you have to just take one blind shot and hope. Here are some shortcuts and moves that could make your next rush job a winner.

1) Learn more with Moat.

Moat.com is a bunch of different things. A New York City based start up, a purveyor of online research via the use of graphic "heat maps", and some really brilliant folks that I was fortunate enough to meet a long time ago. But what they really are, at least for online advertising creatives, is an absolute godsend for ideas in your category, and a massive time savings over less exact tools like Bing and Google Image.

What you'll find at Moat is a search engine based entirely around online ads. Type in a brand or company, and you will see ads in a chronologically based order, with forwardable URLs, with date and publisher site information for last impression seen. In a matter of minutes, you could be seeing what your competitors are doing with their online ads, on what publisher sites they have been running, and if the back history goes back some time, what they tried and are not trying any more. (That is a big clue, by the way. Right up there with checking out competitors in the same space, or brands and services that play to your client's demographics, but in another category.)

Is Moat perfect? Of course not. You can still find stray ads that they do not pick up on Bing or Google Image (especially with affiliate providers), and you will not see creative with personalized and dynamic elements. There is also nothing for email pros, which would be a real help, and you cannot click on the ads to see what a brand might have done on the landing page, either.

But for what Moat delivers and how much it costs to use (nada!), it just rocks. Every designer and sales pro that I've ever shown this site to have thanked me for it. Make it a routine part of your research.

2) Get competitive with Retail Me Not.

If you are working in an affiliate space or just curious to see if the offer terms you are getting as part of your campaign are truly the best, do a little digging on Retail Me Not. It's a consumer engine of offer codes, promo copy and sales information that's very extensive, and based on the URLs of the vendors.

When you use RMN in advance of a client call or as research for a placeholder offer, you are working with an offer that the client has approved and ran in the past. So there is no guesswork that the offer will seem out of left field, or seem overly generous or dangerous to margins. (You should still, of course, check it against the client's site, especially in case of holiday seasonality.) This also lets you get a sense of how aggressive the client has been in the past, and if different kinds of offers have been more commonly used.

By the way, there are plenty of other sites than RMN in the comparison shopping space. I just like it because it is very comprehensive, and has been doing this work for a long time. Nice way to save a few bucks when you are the actual consumer, too.

3) Dig into the demos with Quantcast.

This seems to work less than it used to, but you can frequently get an idea of the demographics of a web site by checking it out on Quantcast, an audience measurement tech company that's been around since 2006. Clues like the average age of the audience and the household income may help to influence decisions on font size, kerning, image choices and more... and there is also the increasing importance of mobile usage, which is another set of considerations.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.