"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics" – Mark Twain
Your company has a Marketing Strategy, right? It’s that set of 102 slides presented by the CMO at the offsite last quarter, immediately after lunch on the second day, the session you may have nodded off in (it’s ok, nobody noticed. Probably). It was the one that talked about customer personas and brand positioning and … Read more
It turns out, alarmingly, that it’s been over a year since my last Online Advertising Business 101 post. And a year is an awfully long time in the world of online advertising. Long enough, in fact, for an entirely new kind of company to emerge and become the next big thing. I’m talking, of course, … Read more
Yes, it’s time for another Online Ad Business 101 post. This post deals with one of the players that I left out of my first post about the online advertising value chain: Ad Exchanges. If you don’t know what an ad exchange is, now’s the time to learn, since these little-known companies (most of which … Read more
Welcome back to my Online Advertising Business 101 series. In my previous posts in this series, I’ve painted a somewhat simplified picture of the major players in the online advertising market, and how they interact; and we’ve looked at some of the technology that these folks use, specifically ad serving technology for advertisers and publishers. … Read more
Welcome to the latest installment of my Online Advertising Business 101 series. So far we’ve looked at the overall value chain, at the mechanics of ad serving, and the role that networks play in creating the market. In this post, I’m going to look at the source of advertising inventory – publishers – in a … Read more
So far in my nascent Online Ad Business 101 series, I’ve covered the overall advertising value chain, and looked at a superficial level at how an ad ‘call’ is actually handled. This installment brings together themes from those two first posts, by taking a look at ad networks. As I have mentioned before, ad networks … Read more
Welcome to the second part of my Online Advertising 101 series. One of the things that I’ve discovered people fail to appreciate about online advertising is how much goes on behind the scenes in order to bring you an innocuous-looking banner ad. Whilst this is a relatively technical topic to cover in a series which … Read more
When you spend as much time as I do examining the workings of the online ad industry, it’s easy to forget that, to many people, it really is pretty opaque. Not only is it characterized by some of the most complex and scalable technology in the world, but it also has its own, pretty unique, … Read more