A Brief Primer on the Online Advertising Industry as it Pertains to Local Online Media.
With all the confusion created by more competition in local online media, it is important to understand how the Online Advertising Industry works.
Online Advertising leapt into the present from the days of Ad Networks and Exchanges to what are now called “Inventory Sources” that are grouped together in DSP’s (Demand Side Platforms). Your average DSP has 350+ Inventory Sources of every stripe, because the Internet has everything available that you can find in life.
Big brand websites are now conglomerates that own more than one site (think Industrial farming), and almost all ad-serving is done on an exchanging commerce level with real time bidding or RTB and programmatic buying.
That this whole industry is “cookie based” where they have to place a cookie before showing an ad, means that they target only “cookie ‘d” users, not transparent websites, and follow this user where ever they go on the web; and some of these sites can make an advertiser feel pretty squeamish.
Aqua Media Direct introduced AQUA PRE-TARGETING™ in 2012 around the time that browser companies like Mozilla Firefox imposed a restriction on 3rd party cookies because of privacy concerns which cut into the available “cookies” for national behavioral and re-targeting campaigns. Safari already had restricted 3rd party cookies, and other browsers were following suit. In fact, the 3rd party cookie which is a staple of the online advertising industry has seen reductions of about 60% of available cookie impressions since 2012.
We began to see the “writing on the wall” back in 2010 when we started to develop our alternative to cookie based advertising which was originally called “PRE-TARGETING”. We blended traditional media with online media, and learned how to place ads “before the click”. We’ve had so many imitators that we now call this targeting model AQUA PRE-TARGETING™, which has been used to conduct local online advertising campaigns very effectively for more than 4 years.
Take aways:
- Because “cookie based” advertising has to cookie a “user” before showing an ad, and that there is a 60% reduction in available cookies from the browser companies’ taking action; “cookie based” advertising is NOT scalable in local advertising.
- “Cookie based” advertising is blind because, by definition, it targets only a user, not a specific website or relevant content.
- Aqua Media Direct, specializes in Local Online Advertising without the use of cookies and our 100% transparent website inventory is scalable in local online advertising.
- Aqua Media Direct has intentionally made local online advertising easy for our Local Media Company clients and continues to do so.
Tom Doyle, CEO, Aqua Media Direct, Inc.