Video Transcript – Ad Blockers & Ad Targeting

Ad Blockers & Ad Targeting – original post here

Hey, welcome back Rankers. Let me see if I can get to the front of the camera properly. The office is absolutely filled with these things. They’re everywhere in my office. I think there’s 50 of them. My staff are hilarious. It’s quite an effort to get from the door to the desk, to where the camera is. Hopefully no work safety inspectors come to the office today, because I’ve already tripped over three times. Pretty funny.

Thank you everyone last week for the wishes, the 10th anniversary. Sorry about the audio, absolutely rookie mistake. Needed new batteries in my beautiful microphones. Anyway, fixed now, hopefully. I wanted to talk to you this week…oh by the way; I’ve got to do this. It’s my birthday. Get that off the hot lights, so we don’t start a fire in our office you can’t get out of quickly.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a couple of new products – well, one new product from Google, and this movement that’s happening. So display advertising, right? Re-marketing, Facebook targeting, all these sorts of things. So how do we do it? I’m one of the guys that tracks you around the Internet. I’m one of the guys that you’ve been to someone’s site and you never stop seeing their ad. That’s us. Well, maybe not never, maybe thirty days you’ll see it for. And then there’s the Facebook targeting, where we can target people that we know are going on a holiday and have a managerial position, and maybe live in a certain suburb, and maybe have a dog, and maybe need a kennel. We can put kennel ads in front of them, when they’re about to go on holiday and all these sorts of things.

So that information is only there, or the ability to do that is only there, because people volunteer that information. So for instance, every time I get on Facebook, you’ll probably…sorry. Every time I get on Facebook, this is what…I’ll come back to this article. It’s a good article. But every time I get onto Facebook, Facebook’s always going to me. “Jim, which city did you live in? Did you live in Melbourne? Because Josh lives in Melbourne. What about Sydney? Jeremy and Dave lived in Sydney. Maybe you live in Sydney. Or maybe Las Vegas, because you’ve been to Las Vegas and Danny lives in Las Vegas. Or maybe it’s Los Angeles, because you seem to have a lot of contacts in Los Angeles.”

So every time I get on, Google’s doing that, or it’s…and it’s telling me, “You know, you’ve only got 55% of your profile complete.” And guess what? That’s all that’s going to be complete. What it also tries to guess is…oh, here we go. Two pending items. What it also tries to guess is…oh no, not that. But this is my nephew. This is my brother-in-law, but I ain’t confirming they’re members of my family. Well, no one does that with Grahame, but that’s another story. But the reason for that is just so I don’t want to give off any more information to Facebook than what they already have and believe you me, they have a lot, as does Google.

One of the products in Facebook ads that you can do is you can upload your whole mailing list, which is quite powerful, because what we find works well in Facebook advertising is people are already familiar with the brand. People who are unfamiliar with the brand, less so. So if you can upload a mailing list into Facebook, that’s great. Well, guess what? Google brought it out next week. You’re going to be able to upload your mailing lists into Google AdWords. And we have discussed if you were running a couple of trials, we’re looking at a couple of clients, we just need a big database that we can use. But that could work really well, because you would be putting your ad in front of people who’re already familiar with the brand at the time when they were actually looking for that thing, unlike the Facebook one, whereas they’re not actually looking for that thing just then they’re goofing off.

So two very different user intents depending on the venue, if you like. So there’s all that. People are getting sick of being stalked around the web and targeted ads and all those sorts of things. And then what’s also happened in the last probably 10 days to a fortnight is Apple brought out iOS 9 and there’s a lot of talk about all the various ad blockers that are now available to block ads inside your phone environment. So for instance if you’ve got ads in an app, it could block those ads in that app. If you’re surfing the web, it obviously blocks all those ads. To me the most annoying ads are YouTube ads. And look, I get bad ads on Facebook all the time. So far on Facebook I keep getting targeted for gay Airbnb, which is just like…it does see my relationship with my wife, so you could target just…but I guess there’s a certain demographic who might be married to wants to go and stay in a gay Airbnb.

The other one that makes no sense though is that more than once I’ve been advertised to for Kotex sanitary napkins, which I absolutely have no requirement for. So there’s some really bad targeting on Facebook, and really, that’s just sloppy, which brings me to this particular ad. So marketers like me are always trying to look for the edge, how to get in front of your competition, how to find the ideal client, how to get the right ad in front of the…that was some balloon. That wasn’t anything else except for a balloon spontaneously exploding.

Anyway, not sure whether you heard, the mics picked that up. But…I’ve lost my train of thought. Periscope people, what was I talking about? Oh God, that’s terrible. Yeah. So this article that came out as well at the same time as all these ad blocking software came out was they thought that was pretty. Ben Kapow aptly named for this particular show on Periscope. Ben Kapow is a viewer of the show and he laughed.

So by the way, Periscope every Tuesday Australian Eastern Standard Time around the midday. And this article came up and it was brought to my attention by Gary Wuzniski, another guy who’s been around the Internet for about 150 years, I believe. So he’s been doing online stuff for a long time. Now this is a really good article and I highly recommend that you have a read of it, especially if you’re out there buying inventory in large networks. And there’s a lot of different networks out there, but the ads are only as good as the people that you’re putting in front of and if they’re achieving your goals.

For instance, I don’t understand why someone would go buy a whole…well, I actually do understand, but I’ll come to that in a second. Why someone would go and buy, “I want 5 million impressions for my ad over the next two months,” and then not monitor the ad to know whether it is becoming conversions. What’s the value of that traffic? It’s not how many people even get to your website, because it might be the wrong people that you’re getting to the website. The ad might be off message or off target for those people that that ad’s in place of.

So the importance of all these ad networks out there is to making sure that you’re monitoring. And I think the response of things like ad blocking software, which has always been around for the web, but now for iOS is a response to irrelevancy of ads. Now, I don’t think necessarily that display advertising is…you aren’t going to die. It’s not. But I think it’s going to change. We’re even seeing Snapchat this week announce…what’s the exact…what it’s called…it’s sponsored selfies. So the idea of that…

And you know, I listen to radio a lot. And I’m constantly amazed at the sorts of ads. Like there’s one on a sports radio station in Melbourne where they’re advertising screw compressors. Now, in case you know what a screw compressor is, it’s used in manufacturing for things like pushing stuff onto conveyor belts and all sorts of things. It’s industrial. And you’re advertising to everybody in Melbourne who may be listening to that radio station at that point. That’s just like throwing and hoping. Why people do that, I’ve got no idea.

So I would say that digital advertising has a lot more accountability certainly than the old off line advertising. But the ad blockers are just a response to, “I don’t want to see that.” So you’re annoying people. So don’t annoy people. You need to work out a way that you can get in front of people and not annoy them and then you might get blocked. So I think iOS advertising is going to change significantly. I think display advertising will always be around, but it has to evolve. It has to be relevant to the user, and that buy persona and that demographic at that time of day. Don’t advertise me something in the middle of the night that I can’t click on and get straight away, or whatever it might be. But relevancy is the key. And then from the advertisers’ perspective it’s monitoring that. And the other camera just switched off.

So the name of the game here. Go and have a read of this article. Be aware of ad blocking, but track everything you do. If you’re buying in other networks, track those networks and what they’re returning for you. But yeah, I think we’re going to see a big change and a big evolution of display advertising over the next couple of years.

That’s it for this week’s show. Thank you for all the birthday wishes and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.