Amiad Solomon, President of semantic targeting company Peer39, recently taught a seminar at the IAB. The above video is a teaser from that seminar. One comment he made that caught our attention was that online publishers should “learn to love their remnant.” We asked him to elaborate on that comment.
Many online marketers seem to be resigned to the notion that a small minority of highly targeted ad impressions usually drive the vast majority of attributed conversion activity.
Some brands believe that in order to generate their desired consumer engagement and achieve the appropriate performance from their campaigns, they can take up a large portion of their ad buys with low-value, poorly targeted ad spots to promote branding, and they expect very little activity from those ads.
As such, these marketers are willing to devote a significant chunk of their online advertising budget to page impressions with no data and unknown relevance to the brand.
On the other side of spectrum, it has become fairly clear from the recent and ongoing growth of innovative networks, DSPs and yield optimizers that many publishers have chosen to make their non-directly sold inventory available to the highest, or sometimes lowest, bidder. Yet even despite the emergence of these platforms, some content owners are OK with getting very low CPMs on the majority of their content as long as their ad spots are filled. Hoards of well-known publishers delegate the great majority of their inventory to the remnant bucket where it is tremendously undersold.
The inefficiencies associated with this system are rampant – especially given the power and ease of semantic data. Semantics brings a true understanding of content meaning and sentiment at the page level, and can help both ad buyers and sellers fully monetize on every impression and maximize consumer engagement with campaigns.
Today’s outdated attitude towards “branding” and remnant impressions leads to under-monetization across the board, and needs to be shown a new and innovative light. Content targeting systems today can offer actionable data and insights on oceans of impressions across massive inventory networks. There is no need for advertisers to waste impressions and for content owners to delegate a significant chunk of inventory to the remnant bucket with no hope of serious monetization. Brands can see significant conversions from that mass of impressions, by infusing them with helpful data and making them more relevant and valuable.
Publishers and brands should change the way they approach remnant. As soon as inventory is labeled as remnant, there emerges a defeatist attitude which says “I cannot monetize on this inventory.” Instead, think of it as mass targeting. Most of the inventory in the remnant bucket today has value that is just beginning to be exploited.
