A Reaction to Quentin George’s presentation at IAB Ad Ops Summit

At the IAB Ad Ops summit, Quentin George, cofounder of Unbound, gave an insightful reality check into the obstacles and challenges that lay ahead for the digital advertising industry in his talk “Perception vs. Reality: What Value Does Automated Advertising Have to Brand Marketers?”

In an ever-evolving industry, Mr. George laid out changes/solutions that are necessary in order to improve certain negative perceptions that currently surround digital advertising.You can watch the video here.

It was nice to see that several of his “solutions” coincided with a lot of LiveIntent’s current offerings and benefits:

Solution – “Reduction of Waste”: the industry needs to do better creating transparency between brands and publishers making sure there the market is efficient.

Reality: Before our technology, email was an inefficient market. Ads had to be bought and sold on send without a guarantee of anyone ever opening, let alone seeing the ad. We allow advertisers and publishers to serve ads dynamically, on-open, guaranteeing users are seeing the right ad at the right time.  

Solution – “Differentiate” and “Contextualize: Personalize your message to each user, do not have just one standard creative that fits for most of your audience while also making sure the contexts of your message fits endemically with where it is being served.

Reality: What he is essentially referring to, is A/B testing – an archaic form of optimizing creative campaigns. Through LiveIntent’s algorithmic optimization tool, L.I.P.S., we use a multitude of data points such as age, newsletter, gender, location, etc to serve ads to the users who are mostly likely to be interested and engage, optimizing to each individual impression; fostering a conversation that will delight every user, not just the majority.

Solution – “Sequence”: Make a user experience that evolves over time, tell a rich narrative do not keep showing users who have already purchased your product the same standard banner ad over and over again.

Reality: Through the use of hashed email addresses, LiveIntent enables advertisers to have a much deeper conversation with their users.Lets say an advertiser has 3 potential users: 

User 1 has no relationship with the brand.

User 2 has signed up for the brands newsletter, but not purchased their product.

User 3 has purchased the brands product.

Through the use of hashed email addresses, we can deliver three different messages to all three users that will evolve as they continue to engage with the product.  We can show User 1 the standard banner ad to get them interested and interacting with the product. Since we know User 2 has already signed up for the newsletter, we can show them a special promotion for the product. With User 3 we can suppress against, only showing new products they might be interested in without inundating them with products they have already bought.