"Page level transparency" & "Brand Safety"

What does this mean to you as the brand manager for an outdoor product?  Does it mean that your ad is on rice paper and the customer can see safely right through your pitch?  Not exactly, but to be serious the whole internet advertising game is moving at light speed, so let's hope you are as well.

Lucid Media is an interesting meta network.  Translation:  Place your outdoor brand ads on the net and Lucid will help you target customers based on activity type and page content.  It is like having a report from an outdoor magazine ahead of time, telling you where the best page would be to match your advertisement to your customer.

And let's not forget about brand safety.  All this means is that when you buy online media, you can be assured that your ad for a high tech tent will not appear next to an article on "5 best ways to keep your house clean while taking care of a newborn"

These meta networks are new news.  Not even a year ago, to place media on the net, you first had to find the reach, then get a handle on what sites to choose that best match your target demographics.  This was by far a manual process.  Tons of different insertion orders and different media specs.  At some point during your campaign, reports would be sent to you showing which ads performed best on which site.  This all occurred after the fact.  You could optimize the placement going forward, but those first few weeks were more of a test than anything else.

So Lucid is here to the rescue. Or not.  What they bring to the table is a very robust taxonomy of websites, broken down by activity.  So while you may be used to targeting outdoor males, Lucid will help you target those males who are more into climbing and less into say disk golf.  Here, let me show you:

Lucid has tons of channels.  For us, we're most interested in "Sports and Recreation"  For those of you with an agency, this is what the media planners are doing in order to prepare your campaign.  They are finding websites with the demographics you need and then negotiating the media spend at the site level.

But here is my problem with this.  Actually, I have several issues.  Look at the categories above.  There are 21 sub categories for this channel (and hundreds of sub sub categories).  So Lucid is making the assumption that you know the relative value of pitching your campaign to a group of golf lovers over a group of camping junkies.  Seriously.  Who knows this?  Maybe you've had a long term license with Leisure Trends and know a little bit more about the types of activites your customers love to do when not using your product, but for many of the smaller outdoor brands the cost of this data is too high.

That is where an experienced digital marketer can help out ( hint hint).  I've built and managed hundreds of outdoor media campaigns, and I know much more about the inner workings of targeted media, and how it either matches up or bucks the trend when it comes to baseline comScore stats.  Sometimes what may seem obvious on the surface isn't so obvious in the details.

For instance, I recently had an outdoor brand come to me with a line of travel hammocks.  They knew little about what their activities their customers liked to do, but they were sure it was light travel.  The campaign was set up to run across several websites, but I knew ahead of time that outdoor fishermen and skydivers would do better than say campers.  This came down to lifestyle patterns and income levels. I also helped them match up the media spend based on focused DMA markets as opposed to a national sweep. 

But still, I think the Lucid solution is a step in the right direction.  At least you can target your customer at a high level contextual match and then refine moving forward.  The guess work about CTR and ROI results has been slightly reduced ahead of time.  The brand safety is nice as well.  But this would need to me monitored, in real time, in order to assure your ad dollars were being used to their best potential.

If anyone would like more info on this, drop me a line and I'd love to walk you through it.