It’s a sick thing to call a hobby, I guess it’s really more of a pastime that I can’t stop doing even when I’m surfing the Web not for work (online advertising). And that’s to be on the look out for PSA’s, or public service ads, or any other type of advertising anomaly.

For the uninitiated, a PSA is something that is served typically when an adserver has nothing else to show – usually it is a mistake since the person who is called on to serve the ad impression has typically paid for that ad and having to show a PSA means they are wasting money since PSAs are, by definition, free and unpaid.

I saw this on IMDB (owned by Amazon) – it looks like not only are they showing a PSA in this ad spot, but it’s showing the wrong size ad in this spot. Double mistake – and looks like the network serving it is Turn due to the image call being from http://img.turn.com/img/server/ads/ps/300×250.jpg (click to expand)

I’m excited about what Michael Singer and the team at InternetEvolution.com are doing – and my first post for them came out today, check it out here.

a.ka. crappy free wifi….

On a trip over the labor day weekend, stuck at the airport a little longer than expected and had the wonderful experience of using some free wi-fi. Now you may ask, how can free be bad. Unfortunately, sometimes a bad ad-supported “free” product is far worse for many users like me who would pay a few dollars for a non-adsupported paid version that:

1. Doesn’t break pages I’m trying to load, unable to deal with ajax, flash etc.
2. Slows down the page via two- or three-hop adserving that ends up in an unpaid PUBLIC-SERVICE AD
3. Have some kind of weird tracking/logging of URLs I’ve visiting

Also, I’ve seen lots of PSAs in my time (occupational hazard in looking at a lot of ads and websites for ads) but at least they could be rotating among different ones instead of the very same one. The service doesn’t let me upload a screenshot right now because it clashes with wordpress here. I blocked the ads but still have to redirect through their proxy to get online.

Ouch – looks like the service is called Freefi, and I can’t link to them either because their system (seems to be iframing the page) and breaks the wordpress links javascript as well. Joys! Hopefully these guys can at least get some paying ads up – don’t annoy people and not even profit yourself!

In online display (banner) advertising, over 99% of advertising impressions do not lead to a click. Some percentage of impressions (let’s say 5% in lieu of more rigorous analysis just yet) are probably noticed by user and have some impact on their subsequent behavior. But that still means at least 90-95% of the advertising that is put out there can be judged by the advertiser to be “waste”.

My company, CPM Advisors, is in the business of helping advertisers reduce that waste and find media that will perform for them per their goals. We are usually able to do a very good job in limiting waste through a variety of techniques that i will not expand upon here at length, but encompass choosing the correct sites and types of placements on those sites, turning things off quickly that do not work, aiming for the right user frequency, etc. etc. and doing this in a rapid and coordinated fashion using technology. It is true, however, that some waste is always going to be necessary for the advertiser to be sure they are maximizing their potential to find their target customer.

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough. – Mario Andretti

Unfortunately there is no perfect information about what users want or are likely to buy. Thus every presentation of a good or service that is put before a consumer is a probabilistic question – what is the likelihood that this person is interested in my service (or, to be more clear – start with – what is the chance this person is going to see my message at all?)? This applies to search keyword purchases too – though there is a lot more “signal” that the user provides about their intentions and state of mind. Many companies make a living by analyzing and exploting the differences between things like someone typing “car insurance plan” and “car insurance plans” – each one may have a very different probability of click and conversion. And so, really the story of advertising is a story about estimated probability of action, and the margin of error of those estimates.

When you slice and dice your campaign – I want to show these different ads with different messages, on different sites, at different times, you cut up the data and you then require more time (and usually, more money) to be able to gather enough data to be able to say something conclusive about performance outside of the margin of error. If you cut things up too many ways too quickly, you lose a lot of signal and are awash in noise.

Don’t get me wrong – we see REAL waste all the time in advertising that we fight against and work to stamp out. Ads that are never seen by a user, or are in a bad place that never gets any clicks  (we literally had one wellknown top-20 site that we discovered never gets any clicks on its ads — never, no exaggeration, and we checked if it was a technical issue and it wasn’t — so our system won’t buy there anymore). There is enough of that inefficiency and waste to be driven out of the system to keep us all busy for a good deal of time, but we won’t be able to get rid of all waste since that will mean we’re not doing our best to find customers for our advertisers.

We now need to apply our minds to thinking about how we can figure out what the “right” amount or an “allowable amount” of waste might be, to set client expectations accordingly and work to build on top of actual performance, meaningful data that can cut down future waste not just for a client in specific but across all companies that advertise online.

OptMD.com serves a LOT of the popunder ads you may see on a variety of sites. Their website allows you to opt out of receiving their pops, which is laudable given the way many popunders have no regard for the wishes of users (even though, they still work for a lot of advertisers). What I found interesting on their opt-out page was the following language beneath:

WARNING: by choosing to opt out you are taking an active position not to support the publishers whose websites you visit and whose content you consume free of charge. In doing so you threaten the long term viability of their operations.

Also, if you were to choose to opt-out, you would see opt-out cookies being placed from a domain called “casalemedia.com” – which of course is one of the big ad networks. It appears they don’t want their name associated with delivering popunders, which is why they use an alternate adserving URL. You won’t find their name anywhere else on the OptMD.com website which is written as if it is a separate company. However, the address given in their privacy policy is the same as that of Casale Media’s LA office. Fun stuff indeed.