Yesterday I was cleaning up an area of my desk and came across an article I printed out last December from mediapost.com. I had forgotten all about it, but was quickly reminded of why I kept it.
The first sentence says it all: “WPP's GroupM is buying media at "wholesale" and reselling it to clients at retail prices, albeit in a greatly enhanced and "optimized" form…”
It is commonplace now that Internet display advertisers re-target people who have visited their website. These advertisers think that because someone visited their site but didn't convert in some way (purchase something, fill out a contact form, etc.) that that person is a hot prospect for future communication eventually leading to a conversion. They showed some initial interest, right? So, they retarget past visitors based on IP addresses and basically stalk them over tens of thousand of different sites.
We believe re-targeting should be done with caution because advertisers risk annoying potential prospects through too much communication.
This is to alert all advertisers to what we call the "one invoice" scam.
It works like this: Advertisers directly, or their media buying company hire a vendor, usually a company that purchases out-of-home media or newspapers to make media buys. In the case of the media buying company, the client probably thinks its buying company is doing the work, but in fact the buying company may farm it out to another vendor because either they are too lazy or ill-equipped to do it themselves.
This is to argue that when it comes to crafting communication plans for advertisers, generalists are much more critical to the task than any specialist ever could be.
An effective generalist in today’s world needs a firm grounding in all aspects of traditional media, interactive media (display advertising, keyword sponsorship in particular) and a working understanding of the benefits and limitations of social media, SEO, PR, direct mail, events and guerilla media to name a few.
For a while mobile advertising has been heralded as the next big thing. Now, however, there is reason to question this thinking, at least as far as college students are concerned.
We were a bit surprised at the Ball Sate University study whose findings were that:
