Thanks to MadisonMott’s professional education fund, I recently had the opportunity to attend a class at General Assembly on ad and yield optimization. Presented by the super savvy team at Study Break Media, the class focused on the ins and outs of monetizing a website or blog with programmatic advertising.
Similar to remarketing or retargeting, programmatic advertising is a highly sophisticated digital ad buying process that serves ads based on information gathered from the user’s previous internet activity. Ads don’t just pop up at random like they used to. These days, incredibly relevant ads appear where you least expect them. You may have noticed that new digital camera you added to your cart on Amazon following you everywhere across the Internet from food blogs to Facebook.
As an account manager, it was interesting for me to learn about the series of players involved in the delivery of these kinds of hyper-targeted impressions, and the opportunities for expanding my client’s reach beyond Google Adwords, to include monetized impressions on other websites, blogs, and apps. It’s a little complex, but here’s a diagram explaining the ad chain from marketer to consumer.
The specifics of how our client’s ads can move through the interwebs are fascinating – and help inform some of the recommendations that we provide on a daily basis. What I found equally as fascinating is how Study Break Media stumbled into this work. In 2007 Study Break Media’s founder, Emry Downinghall, was an intern at easybib.com. He was tasked with discovering a way to monetize the website’s free citation generator service. Rather than attempting to offer subscriptions to poor college students, Emry proposed adding banner advertising to the site’s framework. Fast-forward to 2014, and Study Break Media now manages programmatic advertising for 7 websites in the educational sphere with the ability to reach 85% of students in the US. What started as a side project for some additional mailbox money became one of their core business offerings, and a very successful one at that.
While programmatic advertising may not be right for every client, thinking beyond the traditional scope of digital marketing opportunities and approaching challenges from a different angle can lead to remarkable and sometimes highly profitable solutions. Finding a fresh angle into an audience’s needs leads to the best long-term solutions, regardless of the challenge, and that’s a core part of how we think about marketing here at MadisonMott. It’s why our professional education fund exists too. Our ability to successfully think through the challenges (known as opportunities around here) that our clients face happens in part because we are constantly balancing expertise with new perspective. The more up to date we are about the latest industry trends, the more we can help clients make smart choices about how to leverage them. Like my instructors at Study Break Media proved, a little curiosity goes a very long way.