Digital Media
Lecture 1a: Introduction to Display Ads
How does digital support the marketing journey?
Display ads → Contribute to awareness
Outbound: Not your customers yet.
Inbound: Already shown intention or already bought.
With display ads → Focus on outbound
1.1 The basics of online display ads
• Digital overtook TV in 2016
• Similar global ad spend trends with Internet spending spiking
• Internet has exponential growth. TV becomes flatter. Outdoor is
very slowly increasing.
Digital ad spending by format:
• Display* (awareness) includes:
- Banners (and other)
- Rich media (includes video in figure)
- Sponsorships (social media)
• Display (54.6%) vs. Search (41.6%)
- Display overtook search in 2017
Mobile dominates digital, CTV growing fast (Connected TV)
• Mobile dominates substantially
• Focus on challenges advertising on mobiles
1
,Top 2 firms represent 56.8% of online ad spending
• Google (They dominate in search ads)
- Overall: 37.2%
- Display: 12.5%
• Facebook
- Overall: 19.6%
- Display: 39.1%
• Marketing dominance arises from:
- Targeting & measurement capabilities
- Scale
- Ease of use (particularly for small & medium size businesses)
Why Google and Facebook might also dominate? Jedi blue →
Optional reading → Shady agreement Google and Facebook:
By Google giving Facebook preferential rates and priority
choice of prime ad placements in return for the social
networking giant supporting its ad system and not building
competing ad technologies or using the publisher rival system,
header bidding.
Enter Amazon
• Amazon is big in search
• Amazon now #3 in US digital display ad revenues ($2.76 billion)
• In 2020, Walmart launched ad platform to buy search & display on Walmart.com
• Amazon also has data on actual purchases → more info than Google or Facebook has!
Top 25 companies represent 82% of ad revenue (left)
Despite COVID hit, digital ad spend continues to grow rapidly (right)
Beyond Banner Ads
• Morphing ads: Gather specific target groups, send them a specific ad on features you like.
• More targeted and personal ads
• Morphing enables a website to learn, automatically and near optimally, which banner
advertisements to serve to consumers to maximize click-through rates, brand
consideration, and purchase likelihood.
• Video ads (will come back to that later)
2
,What is an ad impression?
• An impression is a single ad on a single page loaded by a single user at one time.
• How often your ad is shown. An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a
search result page or other site on the Google Network.
Relative importance of pay models
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Cost per Mille (CPM): Mille = 1000 impressions. You pay
as an advertiser for every 1000 impressions.
• Cost per Action (CPA)
Some facts about display ads
• Typical user is served 1,707 banner ads per month
(ComScore)
• Half cost between $0.10 and $0.80 CPM (Turn)
• Click-through rates are 0.1% (DoubleClick)
• Up to 50% of clicks on mobile banner ads are accidental
(GoldSpot Media)
• You can hardly see if your ad was interesting for consumers
Banner ads are sold in one of two ways:
1) Guaranteed Contract
Bulk ad purchase that specifies the price and quantity, as well as
the time frame and targeting criteria
Examples:
- “3 million impressions to US users on the New York Times
finance-related pages in July for $30,000”
- “All impressions on the ESPN homepage on Sept 21 for
$80,000”
2) Ad Exchange
A platform running an auction to determine which advertiser buys an individual
impression in real time (<0.1 seconds)
Example: “Uniqlo participates in a real time bid to display their ad on a fashion blog”
3
, 1.2 Targeting Online
Targeting options
• Demographics
- Publisher provides data that a customer has volunteered
- Data management platform provides data a customer volunteered elsewhere or “best
guess”
- General consumer data
▪ Quality is suspect (Neumann, Tucker & Whitfield 2018)
• Contextual targeting
- Ad is matched to content it is displayed beside
- Fashion blog, Ad of Zara
• Geographic targeting
- User entered, inferred from IP, “pinging” device
- Distinguishing feature of mobile
• Time of day
- Restaurants: Target by sending ads during meal times.
• Database match:
- Merge in own customer relationship management (CRM) database using e-mail or
terrestrial addresses
- Target existing customers (users in merge)
- Prospect for new customers (users not in merge)
- Makes offline sales data visible
- Target existing and new customers with Facebook
• Look-a-like:
- To grow audience, find users that “look-like” your customers meaning similar in
demographics, interests or behaviours
- Set of customers: match attributes. Target customers looking like existing customers
• Behavioural targeting:
- Targeting based on a user’s browsing behaviour
- Ex: “Auto intender”: User who may be in the market for a new car based on visiting
car review sites
• Retargeting:
- Targeting users who interacted (search, browse) with the advertiser
- Dynamic Retargeting: include creative elements related to the content user previously
searched for
▪ Example by Google Ads: Dynamic remarketing takes this a step further, letting
you show previous visitors ads that contain products and services they viewed on
your site. With messages tailored to your audience, dynamic remarketing helps
you build leads and sales by bringing previous visitors back to your site or app to
complete what they started
Linkedin targeting uses database match targeting.
4
Lecture 1a: Introduction to Display Ads
How does digital support the marketing journey?
Display ads → Contribute to awareness
Outbound: Not your customers yet.
Inbound: Already shown intention or already bought.
With display ads → Focus on outbound
1.1 The basics of online display ads
• Digital overtook TV in 2016
• Similar global ad spend trends with Internet spending spiking
• Internet has exponential growth. TV becomes flatter. Outdoor is
very slowly increasing.
Digital ad spending by format:
• Display* (awareness) includes:
- Banners (and other)
- Rich media (includes video in figure)
- Sponsorships (social media)
• Display (54.6%) vs. Search (41.6%)
- Display overtook search in 2017
Mobile dominates digital, CTV growing fast (Connected TV)
• Mobile dominates substantially
• Focus on challenges advertising on mobiles
1
,Top 2 firms represent 56.8% of online ad spending
• Google (They dominate in search ads)
- Overall: 37.2%
- Display: 12.5%
- Overall: 19.6%
- Display: 39.1%
• Marketing dominance arises from:
- Targeting & measurement capabilities
- Scale
- Ease of use (particularly for small & medium size businesses)
Why Google and Facebook might also dominate? Jedi blue →
Optional reading → Shady agreement Google and Facebook:
By Google giving Facebook preferential rates and priority
choice of prime ad placements in return for the social
networking giant supporting its ad system and not building
competing ad technologies or using the publisher rival system,
header bidding.
Enter Amazon
• Amazon is big in search
• Amazon now #3 in US digital display ad revenues ($2.76 billion)
• In 2020, Walmart launched ad platform to buy search & display on Walmart.com
• Amazon also has data on actual purchases → more info than Google or Facebook has!
Top 25 companies represent 82% of ad revenue (left)
Despite COVID hit, digital ad spend continues to grow rapidly (right)
Beyond Banner Ads
• Morphing ads: Gather specific target groups, send them a specific ad on features you like.
• More targeted and personal ads
• Morphing enables a website to learn, automatically and near optimally, which banner
advertisements to serve to consumers to maximize click-through rates, brand
consideration, and purchase likelihood.
• Video ads (will come back to that later)
2
,What is an ad impression?
• An impression is a single ad on a single page loaded by a single user at one time.
• How often your ad is shown. An impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a
search result page or other site on the Google Network.
Relative importance of pay models
• Cost per Click (CPC)
• Cost per Mille (CPM): Mille = 1000 impressions. You pay
as an advertiser for every 1000 impressions.
• Cost per Action (CPA)
Some facts about display ads
• Typical user is served 1,707 banner ads per month
(ComScore)
• Half cost between $0.10 and $0.80 CPM (Turn)
• Click-through rates are 0.1% (DoubleClick)
• Up to 50% of clicks on mobile banner ads are accidental
(GoldSpot Media)
• You can hardly see if your ad was interesting for consumers
Banner ads are sold in one of two ways:
1) Guaranteed Contract
Bulk ad purchase that specifies the price and quantity, as well as
the time frame and targeting criteria
Examples:
- “3 million impressions to US users on the New York Times
finance-related pages in July for $30,000”
- “All impressions on the ESPN homepage on Sept 21 for
$80,000”
2) Ad Exchange
A platform running an auction to determine which advertiser buys an individual
impression in real time (<0.1 seconds)
Example: “Uniqlo participates in a real time bid to display their ad on a fashion blog”
3
, 1.2 Targeting Online
Targeting options
• Demographics
- Publisher provides data that a customer has volunteered
- Data management platform provides data a customer volunteered elsewhere or “best
guess”
- General consumer data
▪ Quality is suspect (Neumann, Tucker & Whitfield 2018)
• Contextual targeting
- Ad is matched to content it is displayed beside
- Fashion blog, Ad of Zara
• Geographic targeting
- User entered, inferred from IP, “pinging” device
- Distinguishing feature of mobile
• Time of day
- Restaurants: Target by sending ads during meal times.
• Database match:
- Merge in own customer relationship management (CRM) database using e-mail or
terrestrial addresses
- Target existing customers (users in merge)
- Prospect for new customers (users not in merge)
- Makes offline sales data visible
- Target existing and new customers with Facebook
• Look-a-like:
- To grow audience, find users that “look-like” your customers meaning similar in
demographics, interests or behaviours
- Set of customers: match attributes. Target customers looking like existing customers
• Behavioural targeting:
- Targeting based on a user’s browsing behaviour
- Ex: “Auto intender”: User who may be in the market for a new car based on visiting
car review sites
• Retargeting:
- Targeting users who interacted (search, browse) with the advertiser
- Dynamic Retargeting: include creative elements related to the content user previously
searched for
▪ Example by Google Ads: Dynamic remarketing takes this a step further, letting
you show previous visitors ads that contain products and services they viewed on
your site. With messages tailored to your audience, dynamic remarketing helps
you build leads and sales by bringing previous visitors back to your site or app to
complete what they started
Linkedin targeting uses database match targeting.
4
