Quarterly Newsletter June, 2008 (5 Articles)
In a Troubled Economy, Online Media will thrive Rich Media and Contextual Relevancy So, you want to build an ad network? When Economic Stakes are High, Advertisers Turn to Online Direct Response Publisher Spotlight

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In a Troubled Economy, Online Media will thrive

by Jarvis Coffin, CEO, Burst Media

As we near the halfway mark of 2008, the online advertising industry in the U.S. continues to advance despite the challenge of a stagnant overall economy. The last time the industry faced such tough times in 2001-2002, it was mowed down. Back then, no one sought refuge online. But today it seems we are stouter and of surer foot, having matured our business and client base considerably over the last seven or eight years. Today it is television and newspapers that are feeling the pain as buyers and seller look to the Internet as high ground.

Much of the gains in online ad spending over the past year can be attributed to the flood of performance driven advertisers taking advantage of the deluge of low cost inventory coming from social networks and portals. However, brand advertisers are not sitting back and just watching. They are as eager as ever to fish where the fish are, which is clearly online, and the industry is responding to this demand with a number of solutions that address their needs. The one getting the most press attention is the rise of the Vertical Ad Network.

Vertical Ad Networks introduce brand marketers to the targeted audiences and interest-based destination web sites that users depend on in their daily lives. Burst Network, with its history of strong publisher relationships, brings these sites together and can craft vertical networks that are highly content focused and highly relevant to a particular demographic that a marketer seeks to reach. Currently Burst Network operates several Vertical Ad Networks including Burst Moms Network, Burst Green Network, CDKitchen Cooking Network and RealGM Sports Network among others. Since the beginning of the year these networks have enhanced our relationship with brand advertisers, and they resonate well with brand-focused media planners. These networks are transparent, perform well, and provide the kind of brand lift that marketers dream of.

Why do vertical networks matter in a down economy? Let's compare them to traditional ad networks like Advertising.com and large vertical sites like iVillage. Burst's vertical networks offer a hand selected set of engaging, well-designed, transparent, diverse, and audience-focused sites. Large ad networks do not provide the level of transparency required by brand owners, and single sites do not offer the diversity of interests that a target audience may have. For example, a mom may be on a parenting site, a career site, and a news site within one session. Burst's Moms Network captures all of those "sides" of Mom through sites like Coolmath.com, BlueSuitmom.com, and MomsWhoThink.com. The reach that an advertiser gets from the Burst Moms Network is nearly identical to the reach of the iVillage Women's Network. Furthermore, the Burst Moms Network has a greater saturation of women 25-54 with children in their household (composition index 8 points higher) than iVillage, and a greater diversity of content to reach Moms in a more contextually relevant way. What this means for an advertiser is minimal media waste, and for the publisher it means better CPMs from their ad network partner.

While I don't believe the Internet will emerge unscathed from the rising tide of uncertainty, it will emerge more confident and, ultimately, dominant. Leadership emerges in trying times. Expect the Internet to lead the way forward from these.

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Rich Media and Contextual Relevancy

By Alan Beard, VP, Strategic Marketing, Rovion

Video Conferencing. Business travel. Trade Shows. Speed Dating.
All of these industries are built upon a simple unavoidable truth: speaking face to face is a more personal and effective way to communicate more than through just text or audio. While some ad creative is easy to ignore, the multisensory experience of a human walking out, making "eye contact" and delivering a short, contextually relevant pitch is very engaging.

The Rovion InPerson rich media unit definitely gets attention -- but the key to driving click-through, awareness, and brand campaigns continues to be brevity and relevancy. The more related the humanized pitch is to the publisher's content and the likely site visitor, the higher the engagement, click-through, recall, and action.

Rovion recently created and managed a campaign for a major movie studio prior to a nationwide theatrical release. There were two goals: drive awareness of the opening weekend date and encourage a click-through to the official site of the movie.

Tracked through Rovion's detailed reporting system and verified by the studio's third-party tags, the click-through numbers told an interesting story: engaging creative is essential but requires context to unlock the action.

After millions of impressions, the overall campaign averaged a 22.4% click-through. The same ad unit had run on ten different sites, ranging from very targeted sites exclusively devoted to upcoming movie releases to general-traffic portals. On one untargeted site (the home page of one of the major TV networks) the CTR was 2.5%, while one of the coming-attractions sites had a CTR of more than 40%. Engaging creative (Rovion's team created the ad) combined with contextual relevance (presenting the ad to people who cared about new movies) was the key to high response rates.

Rovion's history of working with major brands fits well with Burst's diverse range of advertising channels including entertainment, moms, gamers and more as well as its sterling list of clients. We look forward to continuing to build highly-effective rich media campaigns.

 

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So, you want to build an ad network?

By Sean Keaveny, Managing Director, Burst AdConductor

You've got a great web site with an engaged audience, a recognized brand, and solid advertiser relationships. Your advertisers would buy more from you, but you're usually sold out, and just don't have enough inventory on your site. Sounds like the perfect scenario for building an ad network and extending reach into your vertical niche to find more of those engaged users that your advertisers love so much.

You know the market, the sites that you'd like to approach and how to manage inventory and advertising campaigns on your own site. Sounds easy, right?

Well, it's not quite that simple. Some of the sites that join your network are likely to already belong to other networks, and may have their own sales force in place. Others may not have any experience with online advertising, and will need a lot of help in setting up their sites to accept and run your ads. These affiliates will inevitably all have a lot of questions, will demand transparency and control over the advertising that runs on their site, and will require high CPMs to place your ads ahead of other networks.

Your advertisers will also make demands for transparent information about your network to protect their brands, and performance levels that are consistent with the success that they've come to enjoy on web properties that you own and operate. Optimizing campaigns for performance may never have been an issue on your site, but it becomes more challenging when dealing with a network of sites. While spreadsheets and Outlook may have been extremely helpful in managing inventory for your own site, these tools are not going to cut it when it comes to managing inventory across dozens, hundreds, or maybe even thousands of sites.

Should these complications discourage you from building your own ad network? Absolutely not. Your initial thoughts about extending reach into a market you know so well are right, but you do not have to do this alone. With a service platform like AdConductor, building virtual reach is possible without bringing your current business to a halt. You get tools that can forecast, serve, and optimize ads seamlessly across multiple sites, while allowing your affiliate sites to control and manage their own business. You also get resources to help with site recruitment and ongoing customer service that is unique to the ad network business. With full service in these areas, your ad network can grow and thrive.

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When Economic Stakes are High, Advertisers Turn to Online Direct Response

By Rick Noel, Vice President, Sales, Burst Direct

With a tentative economy and the associated belt tightening that Jarvis references in his article, advertising budgets are receiving additional scrutiny. The need for measurable results creates real opportunities for online advertising as discriminating marketers shift advertising budget away from offline media where ROI is more difficult to measure, to channels where impact can be measured quickly and accurately. A recent IDC report "U.S. Internet Advertising 2008-2012 Forecast and Analysis: Defining Economic Crisis," predicts that Internet advertising will experience a compound annual growth rate of 14.9 percent growing from $25.5B in 2007 to $51.1B by 2012 while overall ad spending including traditional media buys will decline.

Today, many advertisers and agencies see success by shifting the risk to the publishers and ad networks by procurement of inventory for direct response campaigns on a Cost per Acquisition (CPA) or Cost per Lead (CPL) basis. With this model, the publisher accepts all of the risk of whether the offer converts as they will only get paid on conversions; regardless of how many times they display an ad or how many clicks they deliver. In fact, the aforementioned IDC report believes revenue from referral and lead generation services will grow from $2.3 billion in 2007 to $5.9 billion in 2012.

So why don't all direct response advertisers purchase media on a referral and lead generation basis? The reason is simple: quality and quantity of distribution. Sophisticated online media buyers focused on direct response campaigns require the broad reach that can only be achieved by ad networks. Not all publishers are willing to run advertising for untested offers on a CPA/CPL basis. Buying online media on a CPM basis with an experienced, reputable ad network is a great way to demonstrate how your offer performs while gaining valuable experience on how to optimize creative, placements and targeting. Sophisticated ad networks can reach from 50-90% of Internet users within a desired geography and can provide cost efficient digital media through variable pricing, aligning the cost of media with the value given to the advertiser.

A recent successful Burst Direct campaign was run by an advertiser in the financial services vertical promoting their loans and credit cards. By using an established display ad network with targeting and pricing options that aligned the cost of media with customer acquisition, the advertiser was able to achieve an effective CPA that was 30% ahead of their business goal within the first month. While continuing to optimize the campaign, Burst helped the advertiser achieve an effective CPA 60% ahead of their goal, delivering a strong ROI to the advertiser within the first three months of flight. When economic times put pressure on marketing budgets and ROI gets center stage, savvy, results-driven media buyers can find value in online direct response advertising.

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Publisher Spotlight

by Susan E. Tuller
Dir. Business Development, Burst Media

Did you ever think that User Generated Content could save you $$$ at the Gas Pumps?

Meet GasBuddy.com, a Burst Network and Burst Direct Publisher since 2003. Dustin Coupal and Jason Toews founded GasBuddy in 2000. Now they manage over 400 local websites designed for users to easily and freely share the price of a gallon of gas at local retail locations. The site allows users to find the cheapest gas stations by zip code, based on prices posted by consumers in their area over the past 48 hours. If you'd like to promote competition and drive down the price of gas, you can enter prices too! Visit GasBuddy.com today and save money at the pumps! Gasbuddy.com has grown with the latest gas price crunch, and is a welcome member of the Burst Family Travelers Network.

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News@Burst Contacts & Credits

If you would like to learn more about Burst Media, please locate our inquiry forms from our contact page.

For submissions or feedback to the editor, please contact Noreen Hafez, at news@burstmedia.com.


Co-editor: Natasha Ahmed, Marketing Communications Specialist
Designer, Online Version: Suki Soltysik, Web Designer
Designer, Print Version: Pamela Sosnowski, Marketing Communications Specialist

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