AUDIENCE
MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS (AMPS): One of the rising terms of
2011. The folks who provide the audience targeting now have
platforms to automate the process of buying audience-targeted
inventory. Since many of them also operate ad networks, it's a
natural extension. Jeff Hirsch, CEO of Audience Science, which has
rebranded as an AMP, said "AMP is the acronym representing a
company that has DMP and DSP capabilities."
BEACONS: A
1-by-1-pixel tag typically used by an advertiser or a third-party
ad server to track a unique user's activity over time. A beacon
helps to properly attribute an online action to ad exposure, even
if the action happened days after being exposed to the ad.
DoubleClick, which originated the concept, still uses the name
"spotlight tags."
BEHAVIORAL
TARGETING: A now old-fashioned term that has been rebranded
as "audience targeting."
BETTER
ADVERTISING (now Evidon): The folks bringing you the
Advertising Option Icon.
BLINDING: The
practice of not designating where the inventory will be placed.
Exchanges or third-party networks will often "blind" an ad at the
publisher's request. Publishers do not want to create "channel
conflict" -- or a situation where someone besides their sales staff
is selling their inventory. (Never let your customer know someone
else sells the same thing cheaper.)
BLUNT
TOOLS: Term referring to a broad-based "spray and pray"
approach, when a campaign doesn't use the available data to target
offers to specific interests of consumers. Amazon and Netflix are
the antithesis of blunt: they use their data to make buying
recommendations based on past purchase behavior that hopefully
results in higher conversions.
CLOUD
COMPUTING: The technology that makes all this data
connection and movement work. Many ad exchanges run on a computing
cloud created by AppNexus which operates as an exchange of
exchanges.
CLUTTER: Your typical
web page, loaded with ads.
CONTEXTUAL
TARGETING: There are two kinds -- natural context, where you
place a bank ad on a finance page, and contextual advertising,
which scans the text of a website for keywords and targets
advertisements based on those keywords, such as ads in Gmail that
pop up based on your email content.
COOKIES: There are
several kinds.
First-party cookies: What your bank and Netflix
use to know it's you when you come to their sites.
Third-party cookies: What an ad server drops on
your browser to designate that you have shown interest in various
product categories or to place you in a demographic group discerned
from your online activity. These cookies can be used to target
advertising.
Flash Cookies: Almost universally publicly derided
in the industry because they're difficult to get off your computer
(but sometimes used for the same reason). To delete them you have
to go to Adobe's website or manually do it through the Flash player
setting on each site you access.
Fresh cookies: Depending on the product category,
fresher pieces of data are better. For example, if I'm in market to
buy a cellphone, I may only shop around for a week or two -- so
cookies dropped on me during the past week or two are more likely
to be reliable.
Cookie deletion: People concerned with privacy
regularly use their browsers to "dump their cache" of cookies. If
you do it, be careful to just dump the third-party ones or you will
have to reenter your information at places where you have
registered. Cookies also dictate frequency caps -- if you dump
regularly, you are more likely to see the same ads over and over
and over again because the ad server won't know you've already seen
it many times.
CREATIVE
OPTIMIZATION: Software systems that enable an advertiser to
default to the highest-performing creative or manage the frequency
of exposure, typically on a direct-response basis.
CPC (COST PER
CLICK): All the amorphous branding talk aside,
cost-per-click -- a division of a campaign's cost by the number of
ad clicks it generated -- is still the reality for much online
direct-response buying reality.
DAA (DIGITAL
ADVERTISING ALLIANCE): The alliance of a bunch of acronymous
trade orgs pushing for self-regulation: The 4A's, the American
Advertising Federation, Association of National Advertisers, the
Direct Marketing Association, the Interactive Advertising Bureau,
the Network Advertising Initiative and the Council of Better
Business Bureaus. The alliance represents more than 5,000 companies
in the space.
DATA
AGGREGATORS: They pull together ad-serving data, conversion
data and third-party data, including those from offline sources
(stripped of personally identifiable info like names and addresses)
like Acxiom, Polk and Experian, to attach as many attributes as
possible to online cookies to refine targeting capabilities.
DMPS (DATA
MANAGEMENT PLATFORMS): The hot term of 2011. These
self-service "dashboard" tools perform a range of services from
collecting, managing, segmenting, sharing and analyzing marketers'
advertising data -- and assuring that your data is your data.
DSP (DEMAND
SIDE PLATFORM): Last year's hottest term. A computer-based
platform the buy-side (agencies and advertisers) uses to automate
media buying across multiple sources with unified targeting, data,
optimization and reporting. Data is treated like media in that it
is layered across the buy and becomes just another part of the
cost. DSPs do not own, purchase, represent or resell inventory from
publishers. As John Montgomery, chief operating officer of mOne
puts it: "A DSP is simply the plumbing that plugs into real-time
inventory sources, such as real-time exchanges, and participates in
a public auction on behalf of its clients." In contrast, ad
networks own or represent inventory from or on behalf of
publishers.
DO NOT
TRACK: Do not call killed telemarketing, and so the online
world fears what will happen if Washington institutes do-not-track
online privacy legislation. If there were one simple place where
consumers could opt out of any ad tracking, would they do it? Do
they understand what the implications are for their favorite
sites?
ECPM:
Effective CPM. Today, most buys are a mix of cost-per-thousand
impressions (CPM) and CPC. The eCPM answers the question: If I buy
a CPC campaign, what would I have paid if I bought it on a cost per
thousand (CPM basis)? It's used to compare whether a CPM or CPC buy
was actually more cost effective. To calculate: Campaign
cost/(impressions delivered/1000).
ENGAGEMENT
RATES: What percent of total impressions for an ad were
hovered on, clicked or somehow interacted with? Usually applies to
a rich-media ad. Smart advertisers are taking it to the next step
and asking questions about what impact a "hover" has on ROI or an
actual sale.
EVIDON: (formerly
BAA, Better Advertising Project) Selected by the DAA to operate the
advertising option icon self-regulatory program.
FREQUENCY
CAPPING: Using cookies to manage the number of times a user
sees a specific ad creative. (Has never been done for most
insurance, teeth whitening or belly-fat ads.)