Delivering better performance, targeting and ROI through a digital distribution platform (DDP)
The first display ad was sold in 1993 by Global Network Navigator (GNN), which holds the title for the first commercial website in history. But, HotWired – the world’s first commercial magazine – changed history by being the first to sell large volume display ads to corporate companies. In 1994, HotWired placed the first display ad on its website. The ad was purchased by AT&T and was 468 x 60 pixels in size. It read, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will”.
Since then display advertising has come a long way. The online media world has increased in size and complexity at an unforeseen speed. It has grown from a handful of websites to innumerable online destinations almost overnight, providing advertisers with plenty of opportunities advertise.
As digital media as a whole has evolved the business of online marketing and advertising has also changed. It has kept pace and become a formidable, accountable and measurable method of communicating with consumers. Unlike traditional mass media advertising, which aims to reach the greatest number of people, one of the benefits of online advertising is that it enables marketers to reach people in a far more targeted way.
A successful digital campaign requires a number of essential elements, including a solid foundation and strategy for email marketing, display advertising across media websites and social media, the implementation of effective organic search and paid-search campaigns as well as tracking of customer behaviour through web analytics. If these elements aren’t executed successfully it can limit the scope and potential of online digital campaigns.
The good news for marketers is that there are (literally) hundreds of technology solution providers to choose from to achieve results. The not so good news is: this wide array of choice can be overwhelming and have its disadvantages. For example: which platform should you choose? And, how do you effectively and efficiently manage multiple campaigns over multiple platforms?
In recent months we have started to see the beginning of some serious market consolidation, which should relieve some of the ‘headaches’ marketers have. For example, on the display advertising side, Omnicom recently announced ‘industry-first’ partnerships with AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft to gain direct access to the Internet companies’ consumer data. The deal, which followed a similar agreement with Google the previous year, gives Omnicom’s agencies the ability to target advertising to particular locations, ages and demographics across the web’s biggest media networks.
In parallel, the industry is experiencing radical change as media buying becomes more automated across multiple digital mediums. Advertisers today are extremely knowledgeable when it comes to understanding the complexity of multi-channel advertising distribution and are demanding more of the results achieved across them. As a result, the skills, services and product lines offered have become more specialised.
There is market demand for a product (or service) that will enable marketers to run digital campaigns across multiple channels from a single platform, allowing them to reach the best possible set of consumers wherever they are consuming content, across the device they are accessing it through.
We call this platform a digital distribution platform (DDP). It is the next phase in performance driven advertising. DDPs are a step beyond ad exchanges and networks and will enable advertisers to develop campaigns that reach the right audience at the right time across the right channel, in line with a specific campaigns’ preferred metrics. For digital marketers this is the pièce de résistance.
Matt Hunt
Managing Director, UK, Adconion Media Group