“Agile advertising” at Cannes Lions and the four feedback loops
So we got invited to speak about our experiences from the last year at the world’s largest and most prestigious advertising festival, Cannes Lions. Last year we were actually credited with Lion in the “Cyber” category for a campaign powered by our very own Meme Machine, and this year we had plenty of agencies using Burt’s tools winning awards.
However, our appearance had nothing to do with awards. The reason for them inviting a year old startup from Gothenburg, Sweden, was naturally that Burt is one the few companies focusing on data-driven ad tech with decent traction among “creative” agencies. So we were asked to share our experiences from working with agencies to change how they make and measure large scale, digital advertising.
A full description of the speech is available here and you can download a subtitled deck here. You just browse right away:
As you can see, the talk was not about technology at all, but the process and workflow that technology can enable. And it was not about the future, but how drastic improvements in advertising effectiveness can be achieved using technologies that has been around for several years.
The thesis is that the existing workflow is actually quite ok, so long as you start integrating the four feedback loops in your workflow. The need for efficient feedback loops is actually the main reason for us building Rich in the first place. When we started out we had Copybox and Meme Machine, two products centered around the idea of real-time, dynamic advertising content, or “personalized ads”.
At the time, it was fairly obvious that personalized ads presented a huge opportunity in terms of maximizing the impact derived from each exposed ad. However, since most marketers weren’t using metrics to learn about consumer behavior in connection to dynamic ads, nobody was getting any better at leveraging the tools.
Sure, there was alot of lip service paid to metrics. It as “solved”, as far as technology companies were concerned. But if you were on the front-lines at an agency, you knew that metrics wasn’t being distributed, and when they were nobody understood what they meant. And naturally, advertisers still considered the lack of transparency in online advertising a major headache. So much for “problem solved”.
So we realized that in order to secure the long term sustainability of what we’re trying to accomplish, we needed to build the first analytics product that would also make sense to front-line people, rather than analysts. Any person involved in a campaign should be able to grasp what’s going on when they see a report, which seems like a reasonable constraint, right?
In december we started seeding out Rich to of our friends, and beginning early may we’ve onboarded more and more users. We’re now into the hundreds of accounts created, having tracked billions of exposures.
It’s been great to see that an easy-to-use metrics tool can be such a powerful driver in changing behavior. We’re also happy to see that those people predicting that “creative types” Not that anyone should be surprised. Metrics is a great game mechanism, that makes people obsess about everything from Baseball to Farmville.
The next couple of months will be really exciting, as we ourselves get more and more feedback on how our users respond to Rich. We like to look at it as that we’re in the first our four feedback loops, working hard to level up to feedback loop number two
However, our appearance this year had nothing to do with awards. The reason for Cannes Lions inviting a year old startup from Gothenburg, Sweden, was that Burt is one the few companies focusing on data-driven ad tech with decent traction among “creative” agencies. So we were asked to share our experiences from working with some of the world’s top agencies to change how they make and measure large scale, digital advertising.
As you can see in the deck, the talk was not about technology at all, but rather the process and workflow that technology can enable if used properly. And it was not about the future, but rather how drastic improvements in advertising effectiveness can be achieved using technologies that has been around for several years. For startup geeks, think of it as an attempt to apply the “lean startup” philosophy to digital advertising.
In fact, in honor of Eric Ries and Steve Blank I actually thought about naming the speech “lean advertising”, or even “the lean agency”, but felt didn’t convey the sense of speed and dynamic capabilities required when working on campaigns.
The thesis (currently a work in progress) is that the existing workflow is actually quite ok – no need to “reinvent the agency” – so long as you start integrating “the four feedback loops” of Agile advertising. The need for efficient feedback loops was actually the main reason for us building Rich in the first place. When we started out we had Copybox and Meme Machine, two products centered around the idea of real-time, dynamic advertising content, or “personalized ads”.
At the time, it was fairly obvious that personalized ads presented a huge opportunity in terms of maximizing the impact derived from each exposed ad. However, since most marketers weren’t using metrics to learn about consumer behavior in connection to dynamic ads, nobody was getting any better at leveraging the tools.
Sure, there has been alot of lip service paid to metrics in online advertising. Metrics was considered “solved”, as far as technology companies were concerned. But if you worked in the front-lines at an agency, you knew that campaigns metrics wasn’t being distributed, and when they were nobody understood what they meant and how to take action. Not to mention the fact that advertisers still considered the lack of transparency in online advertising a major headache. So much for “problem solved”
So we realized that in order to secure the long term sustainability of what we’re trying to accomplish, we needed to build the first analytics product that would also make sense to front-line people, rather than analysts.
Any person involved in a campaign should be able to grasp what’s going on when they see a report and use analytics to improve. Seems like a reasonable constraint, right?
In december we started seeding out an early beta of Rich to of our friends, and from may we’ve onboarded more and more users. We’re now into the hundreds of accounts created, having tracked billions of exposures. It’s been great to see that an easy-to-use metrics tool can be such a powerful driver in changing behavior.
We’re also happy to see that those predicting that “creative types” wouldn’t be interested in data, technology and metrics were plain wrong. Creatives really love metrics – not to mention the competitive dimension they bring Not that anyone should be surprised. Metrics is a great game mechanism, that makes people obsess about everything from Baseball to Farmville. The next couple of months will be really exciting or us, as we get more and more feedback on Rich. We like to look at it as that Rich is in the second our four feedback loops, working hard to level up to feedback loop number three
This is the first in a series of blog posts on online advertising metrics.
Agreement on what different metrics mean is key to put them to productive use. We are currently in the middle of writing up a dictionary for Rich, so that our users can better understand what they are looking at and make easier for them learn how to improve. But getting a proper definition of metrics is not easy, and looking at how other companies use their metrics is not much help.
Take Reach for example, perhaps the most central concept in any media plan. The basic concept for reach is very simple – as the name implies, how many unique individuals did our campaign reach? It does not include any qualitative aspects, such as how many times did we reach each person on average (so called average frequency) or how much impact we got on average for each individual reached. It’s just a raw number – How. Many. Individuals?
Historically, reach has been calculated in different ways depending on media, for instance combining consumer behavior studies and raw distribution in print and a black box combination of set top boxes, phone surveys etc. in TV.
When digital advertising came of age, the industry rejoiced since we could now shoot out a reach metric based on direct observation (usually some cookie counting scheme) rather than some shady statistical model. So in our reports, we get exact numbers. Very impressive. Makes it seem like we really know our stuff, right? However, this is all bullshit. With consumers deleting cookies like crazy and government regulation making it increasingly hard to record user behavior, this model is getting increasingly unsustainable.
I know, I know, there are ways of improving your data integrity thru Flash cookies, device fingerprinting (browser, OS, resolution etc.). At Burt we naturally do things like this, but since people increasingly access online media thru multiple browsers on multiple devices in multiple places, we’re fighting a battle that can’t be won.
Clearly, we have to give up on to the notion that cookies = reach. Stop pretending like we got the exact numbers nailed. Start talking about individuals when describing reach in digital advertising – not cookies, fingerprints etc. Until the singularity hits, advertising is meant to influence human beings, not machines.
At least for now, people buy stuff, computers don’t.
The last couple of weeks have been a fantastic ride for all of us at Burt. Since <releasing Rich for Free> in mid december, we’ve had over a thousand requests for an account and we’re letting on more and more users every week. If you haven’t signed up for an invite – <do it now>!
We’re working on a major update that will be released in a couple of weeks, but yesterday we deployed a couple of tweaks that should make the whole experience of getting started a lot easier:
Product tour and welcome page
One thing we’ve seen is that the person creating the account knows alot about Rich and how it works, but when invited colleagues still want a quick overview after signing up. We therefore created a 30 second product tour that you can take right after logging in.
<shot of welcome page>
Welcome dashboard
<shot of product tour>
Product tour
Test your ad
To make sure you’ve installed Rich ok, we’ve created a testing environment where you can upload or insert a link your ad, and test if Rich is implemented according to plan.
<shot of test your ad>
Updated help page and FAQ
We’ve also updated the help section and added an FAQ. You can check both out <here>.
Improved fraud detection
We’ve already seen our first attempts at impression fraud, and in accordance to IAB recommendations we’ve added filters to identify those, making sure that metrics are fair and square. If you see any suspicious activity, please e-mail support@burtcorp.com and we’ll take a look at it right away.
All this and tens of other tweaks are already deployed and you should see the results the next time you log in to your account. Thanks everyone for making the first month of Rich for Free a great one.
We’ll be back soon with more!
The last couple of weeks have been a fantastic ride for all of us at Burt. Since releasing Rich for Free in mid december, we’ve had over a thousand requests for an account and we’re letting on more and more users every week. If you haven’t signed up for an invite – do it now!
We’re working on a major update that will be released in a couple of weeks, but yesterday we deployed a couple of tweaks that should make the whole experience of getting started a lot easier:
Product tour and welcome page One thing we’ve seen is that the person creating the account knows alot about Rich and how it works, but when invited colleagues still want a quick overview after signing up. We therefore created a 30 second product tour that you can take right after logging in.
Product tour
Welcome dashboard
Test your ad To make sure you’ve installed Rich ok, we’ve created a testing environment where you can upload or insert a link your ad, and test if Rich is implemented according to plan.
Updated help page and FAQ We’ve also updated the help section and added an FAQ. You can check both out here.
Fraud detection We’ve already seen our first attempts at impression fraud, and in accordance to IAB recommendations we’ve added filters to identify those, making sure that metrics are fair and square. If you see any suspicious activity, please e-mail support@burtcorp.com and we’ll take a look at it right away.
All this and tens of other tweaks are already deployed and you’ll see plenty of more updates in the weeks to come.
Thanks everyone for making the first month of Rich for Free a great one!
It’s the last pun based on the product’s name, promise
So last week we finally started seeding the free version of Rich to a wider audience, and ever since we’ve tried to keep up with the avalanche of traffic, emails, invite requests, tweets and press - Brand Republic, Creativity, AOTW, AdExchanger to name those at the top of my head. And we’re on track to have analyzed over 20 million exposures by this evening. Not a bad start.
A nice thing of doing B2B products is that we see a significant drop in activity during the weekends, so there’s at least a theoretical chance of being back on even par come monday morning.
Right now we’re working like mad to upgrade our server park to handle all the companies that want an account. We’ve underestimated short term demand by at least 10x, and want to be dead certain that nobody suffers from scaling issues.
Being popular definitely has it’s downsides. Maintaining stability while opening up more accounts will limit the amount of new features we’ll be able implement during the upcoming couple of weeks. But Rich is still pretty awesome, so there’s no rush We appreciate your continued feedback on what we should prioritize!
For those of you that has yet to request their invite, do it straight away and be sure to recommend Rich to all your friends, more feedback makes a better product in the end for all of us.
Thanks again everyone for making our launch of Rich for Free a great one!
An hour ago, we put a brand new, super-stable version of our analytics platform Rich in play. Some of you have already gotten invites, others have to wait some more, and the rest should sign up for a Rich invite right now!
The biggest difference from our previous Rich platform is that it’s cheaper for us to run, so we can now seed it to wider range of advertisers and agencies without going bankrupt. The feature set is a bit scaled back, but it’s still the most competent analytics tool for banners out there. The tracking code is super small and it runs on top of any ad server or ad network. Try it and see for yourself!
Another big thing happening today is that we’re moving into a new space. It’s huge. 5000 square feet. Our landlords are ad agency extraordinaire CP+B Europe, who moved on to an even bigger place down the road, and they’ve been gracious enough to have given us a good deal.
See the guy hanging?
That’s Fredrik, our new platform developer who started this monday and who’s one of the reasons we had to make the move. Fredrik is a super smart geek that will focus on crunching numbers for your Rich account.
Chris Dixon’s blog has lately emerged as one of the best blogs we read. Lately Chris’ posts has been a lot about early stage funding – something we think a lot about. More recently Chris has been talking about business models, and more specifically advertising based business models.
This post discusses that advertising money is spent where people spend their time. Reach a huge audience and sell your advertising spots expensively. The biggest events gets the most expensive advertising spots: CPM for the Superbowl is closing on $35, a 50% – 100% premium depending on how you measure.
So is not yet the case with the web. As Chris is saying in one paragraph, Google and Facebook are comparatively same sized, but Google brings down the house with +50x Facebooks revenues. The gap is even more clear if you start looking at the time spent on the site: Facebook users spend 3x as much time on the site as Google users do on Google. (alexa.com)
The key sentence in that paragraph is: “the Proctor and Gamble’s of the world will eventually find an effective way to shift the bulk of their ad spending online.”
It’s bound to happen. The medium is still so young. The Internet is today where the TV medium was in the 60’s.
If you look at online advertising today, the most obvious comparison is print media. Banners and Google ads are just print ads with medium reference (the link). In the 60’s TV advertising resembled Radio advertising – talking and not showing. Today TV advertising is more sophisticated: Entourage being my favorite with very sophisticated product placements: iPhone, Blackberry, BMW, Zoo York, etc. You don’t even think of it as advertising any more. Great ads even go viral online on youtube. Imagine that – people seeking out to watch your ads.
So it’s obvious – in order to rake in the big bucks online, advertising agencies need to understand their medium. And that’s what we’re working with at Burt, most recently by launching Rich, a tool to help Creatives understand which ads are successful and why. And we’re working on two other products promising to give creative agencies the tools to squeeze out everything our medium has to offer.
So while others are busy talking, we’re busy building.
So last year we had a blast presenting at Techcrunch50, and earlier this year we had a great time talking about Burt at Plugg. And now it’s time to make an appearance on the mother of all launching conferences, DEMO. And since the last Swedish company presenting a product there was Skype, this naturally feels kind of cool
So on wed. 23 sep at 12:25, we’ll present Rich, a campaign analytics tool focused on creative agencies. The idea is to give agencies everything they need – and nothing they don’t – on one simple report page, that answers critical questions such as “was the ad visible?”, “how long was it visible?” and “did people notice it?
Using campaign metrics to improve your campaigns thru trial-and-error is not a new concept. In fact it’s been around for over ten years. But despite this, most creatives – the art directors, copywriters etc. making the ads and that would have the most to gain from using these tools – have yet to take advantage of one the most prominent features online media has to offer.
But it’s really no wonder considering that the reporting tools were never built with these guys in mind. The tools were created to satisfy the buyers and sellers of advertising, not the creators of it.
So we thought “what if we created a tool specifically tailored for the creative agency, with metrics that makes sense for them?”. As it turns out, that made all the difference.
Basically, Rich is Google Analytics for banners and widgets. It’s third party that runs on top of ad servers such as Atlas and Eyewonder. It can be used for premium inventory or on ad networks and ad exchanges. And the installation is dead simple, it just takes a second or two to track ads with Rich.
The last few weeks have been crazy busy to get Rich in decent shape for Rich. There’s no way that we could have done it without the help from our friends at eLabs – Ruby boutique agency extraordinaire – and CP+B – our favorite agency that has not only provided invaluable feedback on how to design Rich, but also did a huge contribution to the final design. Thanks guys!
But enough talking, there is enough of that going on in marketing analytics as it is. Using metrics to improve your work is a contact sport. So get over to richmetrics.com and get your invite and start getting the insights you never thought possible, in a report you can actually understand.
Update: Just a quick clarification. The actual numbers in the report are fake.
We make software for the advertising industry. We founded Burt to give people a better understanding how the online media works, and enable more clever, entertaining and persuasive campaigns.
Our products are the result from first-hand experiences from creating award-winning campaigns at one of the world's brightest agencies and Burt has been spotlighted at events like Techcrunch50, Web 2.0, Plugg and Cannes Lions.
