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The Ampush Media Blog
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Reminder: Focus
July 29th, 2010One User’s Demands of Demand Side Platforms
June 29th, 2010Long before Google’s recent acquisition of Invite Media, the Internet advertising community was abuzz with rumors of the impending display advertising revolution being wrought by the advent of the demand-side platform (DSP). DSPs, it was said, would disrupt the traditional model of buying display media from publishers, ad networks, and exchanges on a one-off basis with a model that allowed users to purchase inventory in real-time across multiple platforms using one interface.
As a former Wall Street credit analyst, I’m well aware that in financial markets, the pace of product innovation often exceeds the user’s ability to model and understand it (see 2008); while in technology markets, products can often be understood far before they can be built. This is likely due to the fact that the development time for technology products far exceeds the development time for financial products (which are essentially a paper, a pen, and a few good lawyers). The result is mismanaged expectations as hype builds the moment ideas are hatched, rather than the moment products are delivered. As an early adopter (and ardent supporter) of DSPs and their mission, this has certainly been my experience.
The general theme here is that although DSPs are fancy pieces of consumer software built mostly by engineers passionate about software development, the DSP business really is an advertising/service business. Since I’m not a technologist, I’ll leave the product debate surrounding DSPs to the experts. Instead, I’ll opine on some truths that might help DSPs improve the softer, service sides of their businesses to keep happy their current clients and to make happy their new ones:
- DSPs are still a service business: while technology can solve lots of problems, it can’t solve them all (until the Singularity at least). The users of your product are still humans; and we humans will find innumerable ways to misuse or misunderstand your platform. And when we do, having someone to clarify, comfort, and console us is paramount. Even Google – arguably the benchmark of self-serve advertising platforms – allows us to gripe regularly and receive timely responses (however canned they may be). DSPs are still a service business, so staff accordingly.
- If you’re going to be self-serve, then be self-serve: DSPs are meant to be self-serve mechanisms for digital media buyers to manage their display media directly with the same quantitative and qualitative rigor as they do in search. Given the success of AdWords, achieving this goal will not only make DSPs highly usable, but also highly profitable. However, unlike AdWords, many DSPs I’ve demoed have all the sophistication in the world on the back-end, with front-ends that require either a dictionary-sized user manual or that simply don’t work. Even worse is when DSPs impose minimums, contracts, or lengthy approvals before campaigns can start running. If you sell yourself as a self-serve platform, be one. If users need to be regularly handheld through the process of using a DSP, the ‘P’ is sorely missing.
- Not all online marketers are digitally savvy: although many in-house marketers manage media spend directly, some are primarily managers of agencies, consultants, and other freelancers. Moreover, we come from a diverse set of backgrounds – marketing, finance, mathematics, and sales – and all have varying degrees of awareness about online media trends and how they can benefit our individual businesses. So, while the alphabet soup of DSP and RTB may seem elementary, be ready, willing, and excited to educate, not just sell.
- What DSPs do is clear; why it matters isn’t: I don’t profess to be an expert, so perhaps I’m slightly uneducated, but most of the discussions I’ve had with DSPs center around what they do. Undoubtedly, DSPs offer novel and valuable functionality, but when it comes to making tangible the ‘why’ I’ve found myself left wanting. Marketers care far more about the results they can drive – increased revenue, expanded reach, lower costs, higher-quality traffic – than about how those results are driven. Show us why DSPs make our lives better (with tangible data), not just how they do it.
- Marketers are only half-done upon conversion: while I certainly enjoy hitting my Easy Button every time I generate a lead, I really shouldn’t be celebrating too much. After driving high-converting, quality traffic at low cost, I exchange my ‘traffic acquisition’ hat for my ‘reporting and analysis’ cap. To create sustainable and profitable campaigns with an acceptable degree of risk (standard deviation of click/conversion volume, costs, etc), online marketers need to have clear, accurate, and immediate access to data regarding traffic – and this holds true for DSPs. After all, the bidding is real-time; shouldn’t the data be as well? To the marketer, having an easy-to-use, (relatively) real-time analytics interface is equally as valuable as sophisticated back-end technology.
- The idea of using multiple DSPs is a turn-off: at the risk of sounding lazy (I hope my boss doesn’t read this), the need to have a media-buying architecture that accommodates multiple DSPs seems self-defeating. The whole point of aggregating RTB inventory across a number of exchanges is to eliminate the need to operate across multiple platforms and to simplify display buying. If I’m merely replacing the need to manage my spend across multiple exchanges with the need to manage my spend across multiple DSPs, a major component of the value proposition is lost on me. Find a way to make me need your platform, without needing your entire industry.
- Despite the rhetoric, DSPs all seem the same: every time I read about a DSP raising capital, I come across a blurb stating that it has some “key differences from its competitors.” But in every demo I’ve seen, the DSPs all stress their similarities. I’m sure there are differences – probably quite meaningful ones from a technical standpoint. But, as a prospective user, these key differences haven’t manifested themselves to me as key decision points. With all the buzz surrounding DSPs, many marketers by now have a general sense of what all DSPs have in common. Focus on clarifying your unique value propositions, not your baseline similarities.
Well, there you have it. Seven relatively non-technical thoughts from a relatively non-technical digital media buyer on how DSPs could make me – and probably other marketers out there like me – happier with their service and more passionate about their product. This list is by no means comprehensive and my experience may not be the norm. Nonetheless, it is my hope that by opening dialogue and debate on the non-technical side of DSPs their businesses can continue to develop at the same pace, if not faster, than their products.
Book Review: Delivering Happiness
June 7th, 2010One of our founders, Jesse Pujji, received an advance copy of Delivering Happiness, written by CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. Here is his review.
Words are Important: For Profit Education or Career Education?
June 3rd, 2010Today, the CCA (Career College Association) sent out an email regarding the importance of words in communication. The idea is simple: the things we say and more importantly, HOW we say them are critical to pushing forth the right image. In the Career College association, we have schools which are helping people improve their lives every single day. These schools help working adults and other ‘non-traditional’ students improve their careers, earnings and lives. Here is the communication from Harris Miller, president of CCA. Here is an excerpt from the email:
Words matter. The terminology we use in everyday conversation defines how we and others think about the objects of conversation. Politicians know this and fight everyday for the use of words that put their side in the best light—“pro-choice”, rather than “pro-abortion”, “death tax” rather than “estate tax”.
Too often we in career education use “legacy” terms that inadvertently put our own sector in a negative light to those outside, emphasizing the business rather than the educational aspects of our institutions. For instance, some in our industry talk about student “leads” rather than “inquiries,” “sales” rather than “recruitment” or “closing” rather than “finalizing” an application with a prospective student. This needs to change.
People need to start communicating and thinking this way! As people say, thoughts->words->actions. So we couldn’t agree more with the CCA.
One term we really think needs to change: FOR PROFIT education. Who came up with this term? Career Education, Career Colleges… this is the point of the industry. There are all kinds of industries that benefit people which also happen to make a profit (home building, credit cards, you name it.)
So our addition to the CCA email is let’s kill the term “For Profit” education. It misses the point and has created an entirely negative connotation.
http://www.career.org/
Why are CPC’s Going Up?
April 9th, 2010Simple supply and demand. TechCrunch reports that search query volume growth has slowed down rapidly and is now at 7%. As you can imagine, spend on search is growing much quicker. The result? Higher CPC (without necessarily higher quality/better traffic.) This trend will continue until each vertical reaches a ‘market clearing’ price for what a search visitor is worth. Net-net though, it makes it clear that focus will continue to shift to display given that market has the opposite supply/demand trends.
My Favorite Takeaways from REWORK
April 8th, 2010
For those of you outside the tech/startup/software world, REWORK is the highly anticipated 2nd title from the web-based software development firm 37Signals. Aside from being a current user of multiple 37Signals business productivity apps, I’m an active follower of their philosophies when it comes to business, design, management, culture, and more simply – how to get sh*t done.
One of the first books I read when entering the startup world was 37 Signals’ Getting Real, which explained their nuanced approach to software development and project management. While there were many takeaways, the focus on building a software application made it occasionally difficult to relate (although a revisit now would probably be very insightful). Their most recent release, REWORK, is more focused on business, project & time management, and creating the right foundation for a successful company. I found about 60% of their points to be relevant and within that, a healthy mix of things we at Ampush Media do pretty well, things we could improve on, and things we suck at. Needless to say, it’s a great read for anyone who works for a living. Here are some of my favorite points from the book to give you a sampling:
Workaholism
It’s poisonous. When you tell yourself you’re going to work all weekend, or stay late this week, you release the pressure to be efficient. You’re implicitly subtracting thinking smart, finding solutions, and innovating and adding brute force ‘hours’, hoping the equation balances. Unfortunately, that math never works out. Not to mention, you’re less happy if all you do is work.
Draw a line in the sand
I’ve learned one of the most important things in business is to constantly push the ball forward & make progress even if its tiny steps. That becomes a big challenge if you don’t stand for anything, because you have no vision, no dream you are championing and relentlessly pursuing. If you don’t take a stand, you don’t have any context for making your decisions and you end up mulling, deferring, or getting distracted. “If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”
Start a business, not a startup
Finally, some affirmation! While we at Ampush love to think of crazy, innovative ideas, we were certain to embark on our entrepreneurial journey by starting a real business, not a cool idea. To us, that means we sell a product/service with a clear value proposition and defined revenue model, we win over and retain accounts by outcompeting, differentiating and providing excellent customer service. It means we grow organically, and re-invest all of our gross profit to build and improve, and innovate. This section reminded me of this post from our fellow penn Alum Josh Kopelman
Making the call is making progress
My co-founder, Jesse Pujji, is the most skillful debater I know. He can take any side of any debate and list out 5-10 compelling reasons on why either decision is the right one. Combine this inborn skill with our heavy ‘analytical’ backgrounds, and you can understand why we admittedly suffered from analysis/paralysis on more than one occasion. Since those early days, we’ve learned how to tame (timebox) our analytical rigor and simply make a call, and move on. The reality is, when we do less ‘analyzing’, we not only make progress, but we tend to make better decisions!
Focus on what wont change
I love this advice for designing/selling anything to humans. Focus on traits & user preferences that just wont change (like simplicity, ease of use, speed). This point also reminded me of a related term we loved on Wall Street – look for a secular trend – a market phenomenon that will continue for many years and will not be reversed by seasonality or cyclicality (like the use of the internet, ageing baby boomers, or growth of cell phone usage in India).
Interruption is the enemy of productivity
Between phone calls, tweets, facebook messages, text messages, chat, emails, voicemails, and EVEN live human interaction, we are bombarded with interruptions throughout the day. I’m a firm believer that any real work that needs to get done (work that requires thought/focus) requires a buffer period to ‘get in the zone’. It’s asymmetric though – it only takes a simple interruption to fall out of the zone. So when you want to get stuff done, its best to create some isolation, close Outlook (yea i’m old school), silence your phone and don’t resurface until you’ve hit your productivity goal.
Strangers at a cocktail party
Jesse’s younger brother Vinny asked me the other day – why do grownups always talk about the weather? You talk about the weather when you’re with strangers and looking for some small talk to break the ice a bit. I actually don’t mind that too much. BUT – you never want that culture/feeling within your office – and if you hire too fast, or don’t hire for cultural fit, you may end up with a culture of strangers. We want our team to be like a brotherhood (or siblinghood). We’ve already been through some fire and I’m proud to say these guys are the brothers I never had.
Send people home at 5
My dev team is laughing right now. But seriously, I think it’s important to time box the day (unless it’s a critical next day deliverable) and make sure you hit your goals by the end of the day. If you don’t, it’s either because you were inefficient, or you underestimated the time it takes. Solve your inefficiency or problems with time estimation.
Four Letter Words – need, must, just, only, fast, ASAP
Some of the most dangerous words in the dictionary….
The word Just oversimplifies and assumes away all the details of any proposition. “Let’s just start a cash flow business”
Telling a colleague you Need something by sometime is basically an ultimatum – and people generally don’t like ultimatums.
Make sure you know what you are asking for when you say ASAP. It means speed above all else (quality, accuracy, thoroughness).
If you want some more , read the book!
Nick Shah
Co-Founder, Ampush Media
Follow Me: www.twitter.com/aniketkshah
Of Transparency, Lead Management & Lead Products
April 8th, 2010As relative newcomers to the Lead Generation industry, one of the first issues which struck me as odd was the ‘transparency’ issue. Here we are, in an extremely quantitative industry with lots of data, and yet there is such little transparency between lead sellers and lead buyers. There are numbers, data, models to the point where the potential for efficiency is so real (what I mean by efficiency is people pay the right price for whatever it is they are buying.) Yet, this alludes the industry in a very real way. One of the most surprising issues was the fact that lead sellers DO NOT clearly share ‘their sources’ of traffic/leads with the buyers.
Let’s get one thing clear first: not all leads are created equally. Organic Search leads are great and convert high. Paid search is similar. Email is worse. Display somewhere in the middle. What struck us as odd was the fact that sellers go to buyers and say: “here are some leads and they come from a ‘mix’ of sources and we’ll charge you $40 per lead… and they’ll convert at some number which we know will satisfy your conversion requirement” This is the equivalent, to use my old industry, of a financial advisor coming to you and saying I’ll buy some stocks and bonds and get you a return… but I won’t tell you which stocks and bonds.
And this is the part we don’t understand. Why don’t lead sellers just say: “hey, these are search leads, I know they convert like this, so let’s price them like that…. and here are some display leads, we should price these like this.” This simple, clear way of doing business would not only make lead buyers lives easier, but it would allow the ‘lead market’ to be more efficient. At the end of the day, lead buyers have call centers filled with people and they do need leads from all sources… but why not just price leads accordingly? What value does this transparency really add? This article from LeadCritic hits on this key point when Bill Rice says: “Pay the right price and Call them.” I think Lead Buyers may respond: “we’d like to pay the right price, but we don’t know WHERE these leads are from (and sellers change the mix) so HOW can we pay the right price?”
As a part of our goals of bringing transparency, quality and user experience to Education Lead Generation… this is one of the first issues we hope to change. Ampush Media Leads will ALWAYS be clear about our source. Like a financial advisor who has ‘equity’ products and ‘debt’ products and ‘money market’ products, we will do the same. Teacher’s Pet is our Paid Search Product. Soon, we’ll look to roll out a Display Media product. Maybe, we’ll create an SEO product or an affiliate product. Like your portfolio, you should KNOW where your ‘returns’ are coming from. We’ll always be clear about where these leads come from (and of course, we’ll look to make a fair profit) such that our clients can pay the right amount and work them as appropriate (that’s efficiency.)
We think of this as a relatively straightforward, obvious way to help push the market in the right direction. What do you think?
Marketing Feud Between Schools: Example
April 7th, 2010Great example of marketing competition going on at the local level between different types of schools. This seems like a trend that may increase. Here is the link.
The Case for Lead Gen and Non-Profits
April 7th, 2010I’m still pretty new to the education lead generation business so forgive me for having such a basic question, but one thing I haven’t been able to understand particularly well is why universities need lead generators. After all, the trend in most markets is toward disintermediation — and this is especially the case in markets where there are large volumes of participants, low barriers to entry, and transparent prices. To me, SEM interfaces, such as AdWords, seem like the ideal candidates to streamline Internet marketing and eliminate the need for lead generators. But, clearly, as my paycheck attests, this is not the case.
In a post by Kyle James from .eduGuru, he sheds some light on why college web departments are potentially ill-equipped to handle lead and inquiry generation on their own. And as someone who has been mired in the minutia of keywords, ad copy, and analytics for the larger part of my time in the EDU space, James’s insights are a refreshing reminder that the value proposition of lead generation is not just in what we do, but in who — as companies — we are.
The reasons he cites for colleges being ill-equipped to live without lead generators are as follows: 1) College web marketers aren’t conversion experts, 2) College web marketers aren’t agile and 3) College websites/departments are too decentralized. And these factors are even more pronounced in the traditional bureaucracy of non-profit universities (James uses Butler University’s recent spike in search traffic as a case study).
As I think about it more, Ampush, along with many others in the lead gen space, excel in precisely the areas where colleges lack. We thrive on acquiring and continually building expertise in Internet marketing through relentless testing and data analysis. We are lean, flexible, and poised to react quickly to the dynamic nature of the Internet. And we are a tight-knit team, with distributed responsibility but centralized communication and integrated workflow.
So, if lead gen is still a positive ROI source of student acquisition for the relatively sophisticated, marketing savvy, online schools, I can’t help but wonder how we can help non-profits make the leap online and revolutionize the distribution of education.
What SEM Can Teach Display Advertisers
April 6th, 2010A few weeks ago, Noah Brier wrote in an article for AdAge that “online display advertising sucks.” While this is a well-known truth by parties on both sides of the equation — publishers and advertisers — I was struck by the familiarity of his recommendations as to how to improve performance going forward. Among his suggestions, two stood out among the rest: 1) develop more and unique creatives based on target sites, and 2) design ads that blend in more with the sites on which they are running.
If these also sound familiar to you, it is likely because they are tactics that have been embraced by the SEM community and are best-practices in any well-managed paid search campaign. In paid search, marketers have come to understand that one major success factor is the micro-segmentation of keywords into tightly knit ad groups that are then coupled with relevant ad copy across multiple ads; this is the equivalent of Brier’s call for more, unique creatives. Moreover, many search marketers spend lots of time and effort testing ad copy, modifying keyword groups, and restructuring accounts in an effort to deliver paid search results that feel natural to the user — results that actually belong where they are.
What Brier seems to be calling for more than anything in his article is simply that display advertising begin to adopt the rigor — both qualitative and quantitative — that has become commonplace in the paid search space. As display media-buying platforms mature and analytics become more sophisticated, it seems that the same skills that lead to SEM dominance may well be transferable to display. Identifying and acting on shared best-practices across different media can be a huge competitive (or at least first-mover) advantage, and is one that Ampush spends significant time (and thought) trying to achieve.