Making digital advertising more relevant

Digital advertising promised to be the answer to the need for measurement in the branding industry. But, somewhere along the line it got lost. It got wasteful, and it got annoying.

There is a reason that ad blocker is on the rise - and it’s not because 'the internet at large' has conspired to ensure that publishers, smaller ones in particular, cannot afford to eat. According to anti-ad block tool website PageFair, ad blocking had grown by 41% worldwide by June 2015, which could cost publishers about $22 billion a year.

Although publishers argue that advertising funds the internet and is a necessary evil, the general user does not think that way: they just see an interruption, an abstract villain fighting for their attention - and that is in fact the point. Online display advertising is aimed at getting the user’s attention.

The real question is: "What is the user getting in return?" Advertisers will argue product opportunities, specials and services they might not know existed, but this is almost solely dependent on relevance.

Relevance is the big draw card of advertisers, yet so few advertisers are getting it right. Their strategies for relevance are largely based on assumption: So-and-so visited a car blog which means they are interested in buying a car, or so-and-so is on a fashion site, so they must be interested in buying some new shoes. It may be right some of the time, but when the global click-through rate is 0.06% on desktop and 0.63% on mobile, then it is wrong more often than not.

Percentages like that indicate a broken model. As an industry, marketers are often delusional when it comes to campaign results. A campaign that delivers an engagement rate of one percent is considered a massive success, but one percent outside of the relativity of the benchmarks is a horrid result. Campaign benchmarks are often measured by metrics that don’t speak to the campaign objective. A bazillion clicks on a banner is not going to matter if none of them convert and standardising metrics in a world filled with variables seems short-sighted.

Perhaps if relevance improves, the results will follow suit. Programmatic could also be the answer: using big data to create audience buckets to sharpen targeting.

More likely though, the solution is participation. If the user is allowed to choose what is relevant, the perception around online advertising could change and improve its effectiveness. Both Facebook and Google have recently released preference panels that allow the user to decide which verticals are not relevant. The basis of marketing is simple: to communicate value, and if advertising is not doing that, it isn’t relevant.

The big take-out: Relevance is central to the success of digital advertising, so users will increasingly need to be allowed to participate in choosing what content they want to consume.