Wanted - An advertiser - network Partnership

In my earlier articles, I have dwelt extensively on campaign performance and what needs to be done to maintain / increase campaign performance.

Any online campaign should ideally work in a partnership between advertiser and network/publisher. A relationship based on the principle ‘I’ve paid you the money, you deliver’ will get you that far but will fail in due course.

Campaigns succeed or fail for the following reasons –

Creative Latency

Website latency

Lack of interest in the product/service

Poor creative

Wrongly positioned creative

Inappropriate creative

Recently, I had a call from a client who wishes to run a campaign based on pop-unders only. She explained to me that they had tried different creatives and they found pop-unders to be most successful. I had a very clear brief, therefore, to run a pop-unders based campaign only. Brilliant! I was impressed at the clarity on part of the client. I felt like I was entering into a relationship that would be man to man – in terms of the way discussions would proceed post campaign kick-off.

An important element here is for the advertiser to understand display advertising in detail, in terms of factors listed above. If the customer is focused only on ROIs and nothing else, the advertiser/network comes under enormous pressure because on the one hand he has to keep the customer happy and on the other hand he/she has to contend with issues that go with an online initiative.

Such understanding on part of the customer should not only be on account of the technical aspects of a campaign but the ‘commercial’ aspects as well. For example, if a client comes to me asking for IASH inventory (UK) for US $ 0.25, he is asking for the moon! IASH inventory is simply not available at those rates. Likewise, using ROI as an excuse, if a customer offers ridiculously low CPM rates, the campaign is a failure ab initio. It is like accelerating the car with the hand-brake on!

It is not as if all customers lack empathy however. I was running a campaign for a client where CTRs were fairly healthy, till about 2 weeks ago, when they dropped off suddenly. The client did initially throw a fit on declining CTRs, stopped the campaign and asked for a refund of unutilized funds. But after a detailed analysis, I explained to them that with the football world cup this was par for the course! I suggested that we pause the campaign, allow the world cup fever to die down after which we can re-start the campaign. My customer saw logic in my argument and readily agreed. What an understanding customer!

May their tribe increase!