The bigger ad units were supposed to be the savior of display advertising, but I guess you can’t always account for physical placement. Here’s a nice one. Two 300×600 ads side by side below the fold – a marketer’s dream! Here you go IBM (for Lotus product), check out your ads running on InformationWeek.com:

I’m sure Kaiser Permanente, Ford and Oral-B will be very happy to see their ads showing up all next to each other, having a great time there not only together but also at the very bottom of the page on 50 Cent’s website, Thisis50.com.

Now of course it’s probably not a big deal since there are already two 160×600′s and a 728×90 ad above this one in better view. They’re not actually paying a lot for the ads at the bottom of the page, are they?

Oh did I mention the ads also rotate every 60 seconds? Right now things have changed I’m looking at three Palm Pre Plus ads and another two Oral-B ads (I guess that’s what they mean by showing “3 ads per 24 hours per person”). A small example that illustrates a lot of what is wrong with display advertising — it would be like billboards along the highway if anyone who owned any property could put up as many as they liked.

Ooops by the time I wrote this, I saw ANOTHER two Oral-B ads, a Scion ad, an eBay ad, and a Bestbuy/Windows 7 ad. Thanks Traffic Marketplace, Specific Media and Advertising.com! What a great way to make money and offer incredible consumer value at the same time (not). It’s one thing to ferret out bad sites and fake impressions, but here is a problem that is less about the publisher in my opinion than it is about the ad networks’ incompetence.

Just a funny observation when reading this good Newsweek article about privacy, is that there are a lot of behavioral targeting pixels getting fired on that self-same page, including AudienceScience, Quantcast, and Doubleclick. Such is the world we live in:

http://pix04.revsci.net/B09806/b3/0/3/0902121/642641728.js?D=DM_LOC%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.newsweek.com
http://pix04.revsci.net/B09806/b3/0/3/0902121/997357272.js?D=DM_LOC%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.newsweek.com
http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel;r=1520162946;fpan=0;fpa=P0-2043871114-1266555449664;ns=0;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fid%2F233773;ref=;ce=1;je=1;sr=1440x900x32;dg=P9940-W-MS-7;dst=1;et=1266555480477;tzo=480;a=p-1axiNKelAV3F-;labels=Business_Tech
http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel;r=1991808241;fpan=1;fpa=P0-2043871114-1266555449664;ns=0;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fid%2F233773;ref=;ce=1;je=1;sr=1440x900x32;dg=P9940-W-MS-7;dst=1;et=1266555449664;tzo=480;a=p-1axiNKelAV3F-;labels=Business_Tech
http://core.insightexpressai.com/adServer/adServerESI.aspx?bannerID=155498&siteID=N2958.Newsweek&creativeID=35286945
http://core.insightexpressai.com/adServer/adServerESI.aspx?bannerID=157152
http://core.insightexpressai.com/adServer/GetInvite2.aspx?esi=true&bannerID=157152&referer=www.newsweek.com
http://core.insightexpressai.com/adserver/showInvite.aspx?ImageOnly=true&bannerID=157152&esi=true
http://ads.revsci.net/adserver/ako?activate&csid=B09806&ko=2010_2_18__0
http://ads.revsci.net/adserver/ako?activate&csid=B09806&ko=2010_2_18__1
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/b?c1=2&c2=6972086&rn=0.11742583378751214&c7=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fid%2F233773&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c10=&c15=&c16=&c8=Lyons%3A%20How%20Google%20%26%20Facebook%20Violate%20Your%20Privacy%20-%20Newsweek.com&c9=&cv=1.7
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/b?c1=2&c2=6972086&rn=0.6740785767349728&c7=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fid%2F233773&c3=&c4=&c5=&c6=&c10=&c15=&c16=&c8=Lyons%3A%20How%20Google%20%26%20Facebook%20Violate%20Your%20Privacy%20-%20Newsweek.com&c9=&cv=1.7
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/beacon.js
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=91900631&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655545776310180000106049048050
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=91900631&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655548607223311000000106054051
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=92068662&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655545933629473000000106050057
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=92068662&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655548713221232000000106053050
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p2?c1=8&c2=6035585&c3=91900631&c4=autotag&c6=00000126655545776310180000106049048050
http://ad.doubleclick.net/activity;src=2163259;met=1;v=1;pid=45108152;aid=221548926;ko=0;cid=35286945;rid=35304763;rv=1;&timestamp=1266555475555;eid1=2;ecn1=0;etm1=2;eid2=12;ecn2=1;etm2=0;eid3=254307;ecn3=1;etm3=0;eid4=11;ecn4=1;etm4=0;eid5=254300;ecn5=1;etm5=0;

I’m amazed that a senior executive at a major ad company like The Rubicon Project would write something like this (in their Q3 update):

“Many of these platforms ultimately value all inventory equally, from the New York Times or Sports Illustrated, to a niche WordPress sports blog,” [JT] Batson [,Rubicon’s EVP of Revenue and Global Development] said. “And for certain ads, that is OK. But publishers correctly argue that a reader seeing an ad against the trusted brand of a well-known site is more valuable than a reader seeing the ad on a site they don’t fully trust.”

Referencing the “agency-backed buying platforms” which presumably encompasses all demand-side aggregators. Any company on the demand side of the display ad business (agency-backed or not) that does value all inventory equally is surely going to fail. Having a set of well-known branded sites in a campaign is certainly going to create more confidence for brand-sensitive advertisers, but that is of course one of many determinants of the value of inventory. Audience, position on page, user frequency, number of other ads on the page — these are all certainly factors in valuing ad inventory.

As I mentioned on CPMa’s blog recently, some very well-known publisher brands appear to be giving themselves liberally to anyone with an ad to show. Those in our business who have real technology and a real understanding of media know that the way we make this business work is to get past the irrational, emotional responses that “nobody cares about my brand” and bring data to the table to support our suppositions.