Mick Jagger was Right

This blog was previously featured on iMedia Connection on September 29, 2008.

You can’t always get what you want. Hate to break it to you, but it’s true—Mick and the boys were right.

As we continue to grow (and we are—Advertising Week was an unqualified success for us, and I have the hangover to prove it), the online media buying landscape continues to get increasingly more complicated--just like my taxes have over the last 20 years. Remember the glory days of the 1040EZ? It took 20 minutes, I did it myself. Now I’m itemizing, saving receipts, and hiring people to do all this work for me every April—and they have the nerve to charge me for this work. To be honest, I don’t really know what’s going on anymore with my taxes, but I know they get done every year, and I’m not in jail for tax fraud. Although they see lots of reports these days, I think a lot of online advertisers feel the same way.

It’s damn hard to be a good online media buyer these days. There are 4 TV networks and 300 cable outlets, yet there are approximately one million ad-supported websites. In 1998, everybody knew the deal—nobody got fired for buying “the big three”, so that’s exactly what happened. But times have changed.

Today, as this new emerging middle class of quality publishers continues to explode onto the digital media landscape, the “findability” of these publishers is harder than ever. In that IRSish kind of way, we are headed towards an increasingly “itemized” world. That will make the difficult job of buying and managing online media an even tougher task, and it will require an entirely new generation of tools that offer considerably more than an algorithm. Leading agencies are now buying on *thousands* of sites annually (the big three thousand?). For both publishers and buyers, real-time, algorithm-dependent ad optimization means a forfeiture of control—yet maintaining total control over those placements means more work. If you’re a brand-only buyer that is accountable for the environment where every ad appears, then accept the idea that an uber-easy, turnkey, on-the-fly optimization solution doesn’t exist for you. You’re going to need to be involved, you’re going to pay a premium for the right to buy in the “right neighborhoods”, and you’re going to need to find the right management tools that give you the protection you need as you optimize.

And if you’re practicing the noble art of performance-based buying, think twice about your champagne goals if you’re working with a beer budget or pricing structure (confession: I like beer). If it’s only about conversions at the lowest possible price, then you must be willing to forfeit the right to make demands about where your ads appear, and you should quickly relocate to Algorithm City. Publishers will respect your right to ask, so long as you respect their right to say no. As I’ve written before, blind buys are fine...if and only if you’re willing to make the requisite concessions. But trusting an algorithm to optimize a brand-sensitive buy is risky business.

Now…if you’re in the middle of these two kinds of buying missions, you’re a “branded response” marketer. There are more of you every day. You’ll make concessions on acquisition costs in order to control where your ads appear (or more importantly, where they *don’t* appear), and you’re willing to pay a premium to ensure your ads appear in brand-enhancing environments while you continually police ROI. You can’t allow yourself to be at the mercy of the blind algorithm, but performance against KPIs still matters to you as you maintain control over the publishers you work with.

Aside from the challenge of wrangling their clients into signing off on media plans, any savvy online buyer wants it all—free planning and buying tools, perfect workflow that “speaks” to them, a guarantee that they’ve found exactly the right sites for the buy, low prices, never-before–offered placements, total brand protection and transparency, perfect optimization that happens automatically, record-setting conversions, every level of targeting imaginable, and insanely responsive sale reps who never take a day off or call in sick. Frankly, I also think they’d be happy if fax machines were suddenly outlawed and we were forced to get rid of paper IOs. But in a world where you really can’t have it both ways, as the Stones warned us in 1968 (wow—forty years ago), it’s time for us to realize that the old adage is true—you can’t always get what you want.

Regardless of how you buy or sell today, take a good look around the marketplace. Over the next 24 months, the market is going to explode with options for you—tools that offer you the proper balance between automation and control. The marketplace realizes that you want both of them all the time. Keep looking, keep testing, and keep an open mind.

Remember what the Stones taught us. You can’t always get what you want, but:

If you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need.

Posted: 10/01/08 | Responses: 0