Three issues with ad networks …
- Positioning: Most ad networks don’t disclose impressions per site. This means that advertisers or media agencies aren’t sure where their ads will run. This can be a dangerous proposition if your ad turns up in website that you don’t want to be associated with.
- Price transparency: Let’s examine a scenario. An ad network packages display inventory to an agency at say $10 CPM (cost per mille – or cost per thousand impressions). The ad network would then buy a very small portion of the inventory on premium publications at $50 CPM and a large portion of the long tail inventory at $2 CPM. The real eCPM (effective CPM) of the campaign for the ad network is around $2.50, and is far from the agency’s claim of premium inventory. The marketer is however appeased with screen grabs of his ads appearing in premium positions, oblivious of the masquerade while the ad network walks away with a big margin.
- Ad Relevance: More often than not, the ads were out of relevance with the website content as a fall out of point 1, and also because there weren’t intelligent contextual engines built into the ad servers (the server system that churns out the ads) of these ad networks.
Patrick Abboud
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