For a company investing large sums of hard cash producing great content, the return we sometimes get from advertising doesn’t exactly lift the spirits. CPMs of below £1 and thereabouts do not mitigate the expense of producing quality journalism like ours. Nowhere near. And we’re not alone. The entire publishing industry faces the same problem and much of it is of our own making.
Having massively over-supplied the market with inventory with our lame obsession with gazillions of unique users, the market did what markets do. It squeezed and squeezed and found new innovative ways of reaching millions of eyeballs more cheaply than ever before. Witness the rise of the network agencies.
Bad news for us, but bad news in the long run for advertisers too. All those great creatives getting flashed in front of millions of the wrong eyeballs with click-through rates of less than 1 percent. Not great.
It’s not that the ads are bad. It’s just that they are badly targeted and in the process, we, as internet users, have grown increasingly blind to banners and buttons and MPUs. When was the last time you clicked on one? No. Me neither.
The challenging commercial position publishers find themselves in today has many potential solutions: New revenue stream from retail to events, gaming to subscription services. Smarter partnerships that cross traditional editorial / commercial boundaries. And the insight to approach your audience in new creative ways.
At Mirror Group in the past 12 months, we have set out to create products that better engage particular niche audiences. The results have been terrific. MirrorFootball.co.uk and 3am.co.uk – our showbiz gossip website – have allowed us to touch the audience more deeply than ever before. If you consider pages viewed per user as a good indication of engagement, these two websites outperform the mother site – mirror.co.uk – significantly.
But the three million football fans who will flock to MirrorFootball this month for their World Cup news have rich and complex lives outside of football. This is where VisualDNA breaks new ground in what has previously been the rather one-dimensional technologies aimed at behavioural targeting.
By appealing to the user – or customer as I’d rather call them – directly on a clever editorial basis, in this case a brilliantly executed picture-based questionnaire, we can understand them to a far greater degree than has been possible until now.
Whereas before, we could be sure that the user was from the UK and could infer they supported Liverpool FC because they looked at a lot of LFC stories. But what does any of that behaviour tell you about the real person. Very little.
Today, with VisualDNA we know so much more. We know where they want to go on holiday. We know what their next big cash spend will be. We know if they prefer HSBC to NatWest. Or Vodaphone to Orange. And we know what stage of life they’re at. If they’ve got kids. What drives them as people. What their hopes and aspirations are. We are now able to group these users into a comprehensive set of Ad Groups that our advertisers will understand.
Soon we'll be releasing an interface to agencies for them to clearly see all the 129 Ad Groups we have on our network. It's through this level of transparency that we believe we'll be able to engage in a richer and more rewarding exchange between us as publishers and those that wish to reach a more defined audience.
This level of understanding is gold dust.
Gold dust to us as publishers, because it means we can produce more relevant content and deepen our relationship with them. Gold dust to our commercial partners, because for the first time they can intelligently target exactly the right people with the right message on the right site at the right time. And it’s gold dust for the user. Because now, rather than being bombarded with content on a scattergun basis, they are being served content designed just for them. And by content, I mean commercial messages as much as editorial, because a relevant, engaging and timely advert is just as much good content to the user as a great story or picture. It’s a much bandied about truism that content is king. But I’ve never believed that myself. The audience is king.
And a deeper knowledge of what makes your audience tick is the first step to serving that audience properly. This is what VisualDNA enables like nothing before.
