What we now know about ad fraud; ARN’s cheeky SCA investment; Bloody Ritson
Welcome to a midweek edition of Unmade.
Today: New light on the murky digital ad chain; the painful lessons of price promotions; and ARN’s raid lifts Southern Cross Austereo’s share price.
Confessions of a price promo addict
Tim Burrowes writes:
Deep down, even before Mark Ritson weighed in, I knew we were straying away from the path of marketing righteousness.
You see, I’ve heard him talk about pricing strategy before.
But it’s one thing to know something in theory, and another to be two days into a 45% off, end-of-financial-year membership sale when the intervention arrives.
The thing about such promotions, Ritson informed his Marketing Week readers last week, is that they’re lazy. They’re done by marketers who don’t believe in their product. They damage customer loyalty. As Ritson puts it: “They’re the crack cocaine of promotional activity”.
And yet, as you will have seen, Unmade is currently offering 45% off the full price of an Unmade membership. Oops.
Shouldn’t we be confident enough in the value of membership? There’s a lot to the package. After all, we aim to write only original content, dedicated to leaving our readers better informed about the intersecting worlds of marketing and media. We don’t recycle press releases. Our point of difference is that we do fewer articles, instead going deeper and trying to offer time well spent.
All that content goes behind a paywall after two months, so only our paying members get to refer back later. Nearly two years in, there’s a lot of good stuff in the archive now.
Plus, our members get to come to our events more cheaply than anyone else. Right now, tickets for humAIn, our AI conference, and REmade, our returning retail media conference, are both on sale with savings for members.
Shouldn’t that be enough?
Ritson doesn’t hate value add promotions “in controlled and regulated application”, by the way. Which is lucky, because new members of Unmade are also entitled to receive a copy of my book, Media Unmade.
As Stephen Brook said in his review in The Age and the SMH:
“This book fizzes with sexy detail. It leaps from company to company, deal to deal, charting declines and falls, and grand follies, as Nine fights for survival; News Corp and Fairfax cut thousands of staff; the magazine industry implodes; and outdoor advertising surges through a lucrative renaissance. Oh, and Facebook, Google and Netflix turn up.
“There are more cliffhangers than in Dynasty, and the book succeeds wonderfully.”
Ritson’s right. All that should be enough.
And yet… the urgency of a deadline creates results. Every time we’ve run a price promotion, new members have signed up.
Alas, Ritson has been there before. “I still get a lot of pushback from marketers who always preface their comments with ‘I understand where you are coming from,’ but then go on to make some entirely unconvincing argument for their own current disembowelled pricing.”
Like this entire piece.
So maybe it’s time to listen to Ritson.
I’m not brave enough to go cold turkey. And we’re certainly not cancelling EOFYS. I’m not even promising that there will never be another pricing discount from Unmade. But I can guarantee there’ll never be another 45% off membership offer, and each one will be on a smaller delta than the last. We’ll kick our addiction gradually.
As Ritson puts it: “The target of my enmity is the promotional distance between the intended price and the one being offered. The damage exists in that delta.”
Fair enough.
And if you enjoyed the cognitive dissonance of an article about the ills of pricing promotions used in service of promoting a pricing promotion, then I can only suggest you sign up for a membership while prices are low.
Beware the Made For Advertising sites
It must be ad fraud week.
This morning IAB Australia launches its Digital Ad Fraud handbook for publishers. (I assume that’s about prevention, rather than a how-to guide).
And overnight the US-based Association of National Advertisers released the first look at the latest stage of its ongoing investigations into the programmatic supply chain.
Moving up the agenda is a new(ish) enemy: Made For Advertising websites.
The definition from ANA is a polite one: “MFA sites typically use sensational headlines, clickbait, and provocative content to attract visitors and generate page views, which in turn generate ad revenue for the site owner. MFA sites also usually feature low-quality content, and may use tactics such as pop-up ads, auto-play videos, or intrusive ads to maximise ad revenue.”
To be clear, they’re not talking about mainstream sites like news.com.au or Daily Mail online, but rather the out and out superspammy websites created just to bring in grubby traffic and then max out as many page impressions as possible. A lot of that is now low value AI-driven content, remixed (stolen) from elsewhere on the web.
The issue is that agencies are buying this cheap but incredibly low value inventory because it helps them achieve their client targets. Badly constructed incentives reward them for buying on the lowest possible CPM, even if it has little likelihood of achieving any sort of brand objective.
As the AMA warned: “A major reason for the apparent lack of transparency in the programmatic ecosystem is that incentives driving advertiser behavior are often misaligned with the goals of their marketing campaigns. When advertisers prioritize cost over value, they do so to their own detriment.”
There’s no due diligence of these sites, so long as they’re not on a block list.
This study, tracked at log level, covered 21 advertisers and a digital spend of US $123m.
The average digital ad campaign ran across 44,000 websites. Don’t let that number skip past you. The average campaign ran across FORTY FOUR THOUSAND domains.
A full 21 per cent of impressions ran on these MFA websites, a state the ANA describes as “startling”.
Says the study: “Advertisers must better balance their pursuit of low cost inventory in programmatic with ad quality — meaning viewable, fraud free, and brand safe. The ‘cheapest’ media may not be the ‘best’ media. And there should be a greater focus on the importance of context.”
Forget about the long tail. Instead, the ANA urges a retreat to the mainstream: “Streamlining the number of websites used will diminish the risk of purchasing non-viewable and fraudulent inventory. Advertisers can reach a high percentage of target audiences using a few hundred websites.”
The media owners at the big end of town will love that.
The agencies are already leaning into it. WPP’s GroupM announced this week that it had launched its Back to News initiative. It will see it prioritise its clients’ spend on 200 “vetted” news sites from the likes of News Corp, Nine and The Guardian.
Streamlining may make for a more efficient, and safer, buy, but creates an additional risk for niche websites even if they do offer high levels of engagement.
Just like the News Media Bargaining Code, the playing field is becoming less level for the little guys.
SCA, now partly owned by ARN, sees price jump
Seja Al Zaidi writes:
The Unmade Index jumped yesterday, lifting 1.08% to land at 639.8 points on a day when ARN took a bite out of rival radio audio player Southern Cross Media.
ARN’s after-market raid saw SCA’s share price jump 20.39%, making the strongest mover on the Index yesterday. ARN purchased a 14.8% stake. Meanwhile, ARN’s own share price dipped by 0.96%, the second biggest loser of the day after Seven West Media, which fell 1.23%.
Enero Group lifted by 8.46%, while the biggest company on the Index, Nine, rose 1.02%.
Time to leave you to your day. We’ll be back with more later in the week.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher – Unmade
tim@unmade.media
