Open Targeting Platform has been launched

Sometimes you work towards a goal for a long time, indeed sometimes for a very long time. By which I don’t mean “Internet very long” (i.e. 2-3 weeks), but rather a period of months and years. You have the objective in front of you and you follow this path despite numerous obstacles, doubts, various bottlenecks, setbacks and warnings.

Today, nugg.ad has published a case study and at the same time announced the start of its Open Targeting Platform.

What’s it all about? The Open Targeting Platform is a combination of solutions, on which we have worked for a very long time.

1. A cooperative, open platform for publishers and agencies

The Open Targeting Platform provides different possibilities to control targeting campaigns across many publishers and adnetworks – a number of publishers can opt to coordinate a campaign themselves through their portfolio by offering overall frequency capping, for example – or an agency books a campaign involving numerous publishers and adnetworks.

What is special about the nugg.ad approach is the federal principle of the platform, i.e. it is always a loose cooperation between strong local partners (=publishers), by means of whose ad servers the campaigns are usually run (i.e. no central ad server is necessary). That is important, because it is the only way for publishers to retain control over their own inventory and bookings, which is often not the case in other forms of agency targeting. The agency also enjoys considerable advantages from this kind of targeting. First of all, it naturally does not need to build its own system or have its own tags installed (which would not make the publisher happy), etc. Above all, however, in this cooperative solution, in partnership with the agency, publishers and adnetworks can introduce their inventory and advertising space in a whole new manner. Simply by making a higher-quality inventory available, for example. Or by making certain placements possible, which would not be available by means of a network booking through the back door. Or by allowing high quality, interactive streaming advertisements, which must be integrated elaborately into their portfolio. Many restrictions of conventional agency targeting are avoided.

It is quite simple – such targeting campaigns just work better. And the L’Oréal case study published today with the Zed digital agency proves precisely that a high-quality branding campaign with a large range can be achieved with such an infrastructure, despite elaborate advertising materials!

“Considerably more range in the target group was achieved than we previously expected.” (Lothar Prison, Zed digital)

We consider this solution to be the best option to bring together all partners for an agency with their data and controlling opportunities. It means that agencies will be able to carry out impressive targeting campaigns (incidentally, also with their own target groups) – but above all, the publishers involved can demonstrate that they are capable of bringing their high-quality portfolios into the market in a combined and flexible manner, without the agencies having to resort to using Google or other across-the-board platforms (with all of the known disadvantages).

And of course we take on suggestions in the Online Behavioural Advertising Manifesto of the FOMA (Association of Media Agencies), which was prominent in demanding decentralised solutions for targeting with free access for all market participants – that is exactly the idea behind the Open Targeting Platform!

2. A platform for branding campaigns with completely new metrics and optimisation possibilities

We first introduced the idea at the dmmk 2007 to replace the much despised click as a metric with something new, particularly for branding campaigns. But why? There are methodical and economic reasons for doing so. From a methodical point of view, many – particularly with regard to branding campaigns – feel that the fact that someone clicks on advertising gives very little and at best an indirect indication about whether or not the campaign goal has been achieved. It so happens that campaigns are often directed at the “click in the head”. In other words, the user should remember a brand/product, think it is great and then, much later, choose it intuitively from the supermarket shelf. Clicks cannot show very clearly whether a campaign has achieved this goal – this rather requires conventional market research methods, which explicitly register the branding effect, such as brand awareness, brand affinity and purchase intention.

Marketers can use this information much better where the evaluation of the effect of their campaigns is concerned.

The task, therefore, was to make this market research effect measurement available in such a way that the technical click really could be replaced. This was only possible by means of a very consistent standardisation of the market research element. We worked together with our colleagues from d.core on this point, and the result was an extremely streamlined survey method, which could be automated, and which could accompany a campaign in an almost fully automatic manner.

The fact that the branding measurement now simply runs in parallel and is immediately available as a standardised index means that we can, firstly, also deliver standardised effect reports for the campaign (by which campaigns can also be compared with each other, etc.) and, secondly, it is even possible to optimise the campaign to its maximum branding effect, while it is running. To do so, the algorithm is simply fed and trained with the branding values.

In addition, with innovative contact class optimisation, which also makes it possible to avoid too low contact doses  (so-called frequency boosting), we have created the prerequisites to deliver the branding campaign in desired contact corridors, often of between 3 to 8 or 10 contacts, for example. This is extremely significant because contact doses under a threshold of 2-3 contacts are generally considered to be worthless, particularly in branding campaigns (read out press release for more insights on the matter).

We are convinced that a whole new generation of online campaigns can be carried out in the future with these two elements, with a focus on branding effects, while at the same time achieving large ranges and making optimum use of the high-quality environments of the participating publishers. The results of the first campaigns have proven us right and we are, of course, happy to have found, both in L’Oréal and Zed digital, such an extremely suitable case for trying out everything! And we are naturally very grateful to the participating advertisers for their trust in this cooperative approach and for their support in carrying out this campaign.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 2:02 pm and is filed under Targeting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.