"I hate those shoot the monkey ads," replied my doctor when I explained to her what I do as the creative director of Advertising.com. Not the nicest bedside manner, but I've heard worse when I tell people that my team creates online ads.

With all the complaints about rich media, some advertisers wonder if it's worth it, especially when you consider the additional hassle of dealing with temperamental creative departments. Before answering, however, it's important to define exactly what it is.

Many publishers consider an ad only to be rich media if it automatically takes over a page, with the user having no control over initiating the intrusive message. But because users will only put up with so much of that intrusiveness, publishers limit the amount of this kind of impression and charge accordingly.

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Over the past year, there has been a distinct trend in the kinds of network buys advertisers are making, creating interesting implications for publishers. With more sophisticated targeting capabilities available from networks, advertisers are increasingly addressing multiple objectives through network segmentation. While individual endemic site inventory remains a core branding vehicle, networks provide a valuable addition to the branding mix. (For those not familiar with the term "endemic sites," these are essentially vertical-specific sites. Ex. An endemic site for an automotive advertiser would be Cars.com; an endemic site for a movie advertiser would be Fandango.) This is good news for publishers, because the more sophisticated the targeting tools a network can offer to advertisers, the higher the potential inventory yield for publishers.

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Behavioral retargeting campaigns are often constrained by target population size, which leads advertisers to run retargeting campaigns across multiple ad networks in order to garner additional reach. But the fact is most networks buy inventory from the same or a similar pool of sites, which means there is a lot of overlap in audience between networks. A far more efficient use of budget is to run campaigns across one large, high-quality network. It's the best possible way to optimize reach while controlling frequency and cost.

Why retargeting?
User-based online behavioral retargeting identifies website visitation as an explicit demonstration of interest in an advertiser's products and services. Users that have visited the advertiser's site are thus targeted as they surf other sites with tailored messages intended to drive re-visitation and conversion.

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"Share of voice" (SOV) is a metric long used to guide media buys. It attempts to quantify an advertiser's share of advertising activity over a period of time relative to others in the same market segment. For example, in television advertising, SOV may represent the proportion of advertising per advertiser for a 30-minute TV program.

Because SOV is one of the most common means of measuring audience attention in other media, it is no surprise that media planners have attempted to migrate this metric to the internet. Unfortunately, due to the non-linear nature of hypertext, measuring SOV online is difficult and the method that many media planners use to incorporate SOV calculations into media plans is flawed.

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Consumption of online video is on the rise. In the U.S., the number of online video viewers has grown from around 55M in 2003 to nearly 140M in 2007, with projections of 160M by 2010. Okay, so video is on everyone's radar by now, but there's a lot more to the story than one might think.

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Pay only for sales? It's a marketer's dream. And with ad networks, it's an advertising reality.

Because networks work with hundreds of advertisers and thousands of sites with billions of impressions, they've had to develop technologies to automate the allocation process. These optimization tools consider factors such as the marketer's goals, the consumer's observed response, and the websites' characteristics to determine when and where to serve which ad. Optimization became so effective that networks were able to sell advertising on a pay-for-performance or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) basis, with the network shouldering the risk, not the marketer.

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Not surprisingly, the internet is a hugely popular destination for auto research, putting information about every possible make and model at consumers' fingertips. In fact, a January 2007 eMarketer study found that 32 percent of consumers cited the internet as the best source for retrieving auto-related information. And with consumers spending more and more time in general on the web vs. other media, online marketing is exploding as a way to reach consumers at every stage of the purchase funnel, from building mindshare and influencing preferences before the actual car shopping starts to helping seal the deal among an in-market, auto-buying audience.

Most marketers look first to reach "bottom-of-the-funnel" shoppers -- those consumers closest to making a purchase -- through auto research and informational sites. As a result, advertising inventory on these sites is at a premium. Additionally, advertising on larger, more well-known lifestyle sites is popular, and marketers will vie for inventory there as well. The cost for these "top-of-the-funnel" placements is also high, and inventory sells out fairly quickly.

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One reason rep firms have come back into vogue is that they offer transparency of the sites they represent-- a security blanket for advertisers who want to be sure they steer clear of the web's sloppier, less desirable sites.

But many online advertising networks don't provide full site disclosure, which makes some advertisers a bit nervous. Where will my ad be seen? Am I risking my brand's reputation? How can I be sure I'm reaching my target if I don't know where my ads are? Am I wasting my money? This unease causes some advertisers and agencies to forego the inherent reach, efficiency and performance of a network for the security of a site list. Big mistake.

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The line between the offline and online worlds of entertainment is blurring, thanks in large part to the ongoing rise of video-friendly broadband (90 percent of all households will have it by 2008, according to eMarketer). Online video combines television's sight, sound and motion with the internet's interactivity and accountability. As a result, online video advertising is opening new doors to consumers-- enabling marketers to engage highly targeted audiences, providing valuable insights to boot.

An important key to unlocking this potential is the online video advertising network. Networks enable you to fully capitalize on all that online video has to offer-- in scale, at your most efficient costs, with single-vendor simplicity.

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No doubt about it-- search engine marketing is a proven and highly effective way to generate business on the internet. But executing a truly successful search campaign isn't always simple. It presents a number of technical and administrative challenges, and increasingly, it's becoming a very expensive buy.

With more and more effort and budget at stake, marketers must be more vigilant than ever about optimizing keyword bids and ensuring they extract as much value as possible from their online media plan. One excellent way to do just that is to leverage an online advertising network. A network will help you make the most not only of your search listing, but also every click it generates.

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The more advertisers get on the behavioral targeting bandwagon, the more we discover how effective the technique can be in a wide variety of applications and across the purchase cycle. In fact, it seems there's virtually no marketing objective to which behavioral targeting can't be successfully applied.

From building awareness to generating conversions, behavioral targeting is proving itself to be an advertiser's most versatile tool-- with one caveat. Behavioral targeting is nothing without scale; which means a large and high quality network is a must.

Behavioral targeting utilized across a single site can provide limited and often redundant reach, with ads often being exposed to the same visitors over and over again. But a network campaign not only can extend the reach of a single-site or portal buy, it can actually replace those buys when inventory is sold out-- reaching an identical audience across the network. Best of all, behavioral targeting over a network provides the efficiency of higher reach at lower costs.

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Marketers are always looking for ways to improve the value of their ad buys, and the measurability of the internet makes that easy in most circumstances. From brand impact to site traffic to actual sales, advertisers can access a wide variety of data about their campaign to assess performance, such as impressions, total number of clicks, CTR and more. With all this data, defining "performance" and determining what metrics are most important becomes the challenge. Is the goal to drive site traffic, or is it to drive traffic that will result in a sale? And at what cost will such an action be achieved?

Often times, marketers will look to the most obvious and easily tracked metrics -- such as clickthrough rate (CTR) -- as their key measure of performance. While CTR is a valuable indicator of a campaign's results, marketers must dig a little deeper to determine whether the campaign was truly effective. Clickthrough rate alone does not consider the relative value of each click, which can include: conversions resulting from those clicks, the overall price of the buy, total number of impressions served or total reach of a unique audience.

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Entertainment advertisers regularly face the daunting challenge of generating mass awareness for time-limited events and promotions. The window for grabbing mindshare for an upcoming event, premiere or launch is restricted. And with consumers now in greater control of what, when and where media is consumed, it takes more creativity than ever to get the job done.

Luckily, online, marketers have a number of tools to help them create mass awareness in a short period of time among a highly targeted audience. They also have the ability to measure in real time the effects of their campaigns. Strategies such as single-site and network-wide roadblocks are particularly well suited to these tasks.

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There's no doubt that engagement is one of the hottest subjects in marketing communications right now. In an unprecedented act of collaboration, virtually all major associations -- ARF, AAAA and ANA -- have come together to crack the engagement code and provide a standard industry definition.

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