Today, the Wall Street Journal reported that Kraft Foods, Greyhound Lines and Capital One Financial bought invisible ads on several ad networks. Oh, they didn’t plan for them to be invisible, nor did they plan to pay for “phantom” viewer impressions. Quite simply, while we were all sleeping (read: not effectively auditing our online ads) some rogue web sites were busy selling more online ad space than they legitimately had for sale. Oh my!
Here’s how it works: The marketers place their online display advertising orders with various “ad networks” which aggregate web sites and offer impressions based on relatively low CPM’s (cost-per-thousands) in order to gain efficiencies. Then some of the web sites on the ad network buy create ads using specific code that makes it appear to the marketers that their ads are running on genuine web sites. However, site visitors can’t actually see the ads because they’ve been relegated to invisible Web pages on the site. The marketers have been duped!
Advertising on the Web is, no doubt, an extremely integral and valuable part of the media mix for most marketers today. But it can also be a slippery slope fraught with unwelcome surprises. So how do we do a better job to monitor our ads and ensure that they legitimately run? Should marketers insist that Web sites (and ad networks) move away from CPM pricing model to a PPC (pay-per-click) model? Will that solve anything or will the evil doers just find new ways to dupe us if we do that? One thing’s for sure, we’re all going to have to “wake up” and pay closer attention if we want to stay ahead of this.
What are your thoughts?
Here’s how it works: The marketers place their online display advertising orders with various “ad networks” which aggregate web sites and offer impressions based on relatively low CPM’s (cost-per-thousands) in order to gain efficiencies. Then some of the web sites on the ad network buy create ads using specific code that makes it appear to the marketers that their ads are running on genuine web sites. However, site visitors can’t actually see the ads because they’ve been relegated to invisible Web pages on the site. The marketers have been duped!
Advertising on the Web is, no doubt, an extremely integral and valuable part of the media mix for most marketers today. But it can also be a slippery slope fraught with unwelcome surprises. So how do we do a better job to monitor our ads and ensure that they legitimately run? Should marketers insist that Web sites (and ad networks) move away from CPM pricing model to a PPC (pay-per-click) model? Will that solve anything or will the evil doers just find new ways to dupe us if we do that? One thing’s for sure, we’re all going to have to “wake up” and pay closer attention if we want to stay ahead of this.
What are your thoughts?
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