Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of blog posts focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.

Year after year universities struggle with enrollment rates. At the same time marketers are testing new advertising channels, shifting budgets, designing new creative assets and everything in between to reach that seemingly elusive enrollment goal.

But why is nothing changing? Why are enrollment rates dropping after all that investment in time, money and effort?

It’s simple, really: The first point of contact is your first impression and it can make or break the success of a prospect’s enrollment. The best advertising campaign in the world is frustratingly useless if the admissions process deters prospective students.

Many universities with large marketing budgets fail to focus on what’s happening right under their nose, and in most cases, right down the hallway. I have seen everything from a first point of contact being a direct-mail piece to callbacks that occur two weeks after an online information request is submitted.

A successful online marketing campaign for a college or university isn’t just measured by a conversion rate. Performance marketing in education requires three critical components to be successful:

1. High-quality traffic sources: You need to have traffic (students) who are interested in learning more about a particular school.
2. Optimized creative: A high-quality landing page, great email design and banner ads that really catch the eye of prospective students.
3. Structured workflow: A cohesive admissions process that is ready to work a lead.

You can leave the first two requirements to the experts at MediaWhiz. We know what converts well in terms of website and landing-page design and we know what media mix will work best for you based on your program offerings, location and unique application requirements.

The third component is where you and your admission team come in. The admissions process needs to be prepared for these new prospects, armed with answers to their questions and the ability to guide them in the right direction based on their needs.

Below are a few best practices to follow to ensure your admissions team effectively and efficiently closes the loop from the time an information request is made to the ultimate goal of enrollment.

1. Your first point of contact should be a phone call. Anything less puts you light years behind your competitors who are using this tactic.
2. Call the prospect within 24 hours. Some schools call back within the hour, but manage these times within your team’s bandwidth.
3. Make sure your team has some sales background. At the end of the day you need your team to sell your school and help finalize the decision process for the potential student.
4. Make sure your Admission Representative:

• Asks open-ended questions
• Probes to identify buying motives
• Acknowledges prospects needs and concerns
• Links program details to buying motives
• Uncovers objections
• Addresses objections with solutions
• Creates a sense of urgency
• Gains commitment

5. Have a strong call closing. Assure that the prospect begins the application process immediately or that they have everything they need to begin the application  before ending the call. I’ve seen too many universities direct their prospect to an email that often ends up in the spam folder. Needless to say, the application process ends there.

6. Follow up on the prospects that are not interested at this time. If a prospect doesn’t sign-up after two weeks, it doesn’t mean they won’t sign-up in the future. All it costs is the price of a stamp or an email distribution to stay in touch with the prospect for as long as you wish. Some take up to a year to decide to attend college.

The purpose of advertising is to sell. It’s crucial, therefore, to have a strong admissions team that can sell the school and its programs and get the prospect to begin the application process while on the phone. Unfortunately, education will not sell itself. The competition in the education market is only getting stronger. If you’re not managing your lead flow efficiently, you could be handing hundreds of thousands of enrollment dollars to your competitors.

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The post Lead Nurturing: The Crucial Steps That Affect Your Enrollment Rate appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Last year there were a plethora of logo changes across many major businesses. In the case of American Airlines, not every logo change is welcomed by customers or the general public.

Logo changes can play a major role in developing a new image for your company, but not all logo changes require major design changes; just ask the Minnesota Vikings.

Recently, MediaWhiz Creative Director Giles McGrath took some time to answer questions related to the benefits – and potential pitfalls – of brands redesigning their logos. He also offered some best practices you can use to ensure the successful redesign of your logo.

1) How do you know when it’s really time for a redesign and that you’re not just listening to others who say you need a new logo? How do you make your new logo/branding stand out?

There is no simple answer as to when a logo should be redesigned. Often companies will undertake a redesign prematurely. Some questions brands should ask themselves prior to undertaking a redesign include:

1. How does my logo reflect on my brand positioning and personality of my business?
2. Is my logo still unique in the market?
3. Has the focus of my business changed?
4. Would a new logo reflect the new direction of my business?

2) How do you know when you’re spending too much (and about what should you be prepared to spend)?

The cost of logo redesigns vary widely. Some of the most famous corporate logos were free, such as the iconic logos for Google (designed by co-founder Sergey Brin), CocoCola (by Frank Mason Robinson) and Twitter (done for $15 by Simon Oxley). Conversely, companies like Pepsi spent more than $1 million on the design of its new logo, and the BBC spent more than $1.8 million on its logo redesign.

It is important to measure the expected impact of the logo redesign as a factor in the cost and make sure you are in a positive-ROI position. For 90% of brands a redesign should never cost more than $50,000.

3)How do you make your company look “fresh” without changing so much that you lose loyal customers?

Using Pepsi’s recent logo redesign as an example, it is best practice to “update” a design as opposed to an outright logo “redesign.” The purpose being that after the upgrade the logo should look like it is a part of the same family. If done correctly, you will achieve a “fresh” look without distancing yourself from your brand’s original logo and current brand advocates.

We hope this helps you and your business when the time comes to redesign or change your current logo. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to comment or contact us on twitter @MediaWhizInc.

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The post Best Practices for Redesigning Your Brand’s Logo appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Today, we released a new eBook on content marketing. Titled, “Content Marketing Like a Pro,” the report outlines the key pillars to content marketing and advises marketers on best practices for crafting and executing successful content marketing programs.

Download the eBook

This eBook also provides a framework marketers can use to improve their brand’s SEO and generate leads via a content marketing program.

When consumers first encounter a brand digitally it’s not always the brand’s website that makes the first impression. What makes the greatest impression is the authority of the brand’s website measured by where it ranks when a consumer searches.

Content marketing is a method to build this authority and rank.

Learn how to use content marketing to generate leads and improve your brand’s SEO with MediaWhiz’s new eBook, “Content Marketing Like a Pro.”

Key Takeaways

1. Content marketing can drive leads directly and indirectly. Direct click-throughs can be created from content marketing pieces to a website for lead-generation purposes. Leads can also be generated indirectly by impacting the performance of other channels, such as SEO.
2. Focus on the audience. Even if content marketing efforts are utilized with the goal of improving SEO, it is important to focus on how the content will benefit consumers. By defining the target audience and performing the research necessary to understand what that audience values, content can be created to provide value to the consumer that will in turn lead to engagement and success.
3. Measure results. There is a great deal of learning that comes from each content marketing campaign. By tracking and analyzing key performance indicators associated with the efforts, this data can be leveraged to improve future campaigns and understand the types of content that resonate most with the target consumer.

Download the eBook

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The post [REPORT] How to Generate Leads Using Content Marketing appeared first on MediaWhiz.

An article written by Marc Purtell, director of SEO at MediaWhiz, and published Nov. 20, 2012, in Search Engine Journal, has been honored with a “Best of SEJ” award for 2012. Titled, “SEO in 2013: The Rising Influence of AuthorRank,” it was the most-read article on Search Engine Journal in November, according to the publication’s editors.

In honoring Purtell with the “Best of SEJ” distinction, former Search Engine Journal Editor-in-Chief Phil Butler described the article as an “insightful look at the emerging value of authors in search [that] from one of the industry’s most knowledgeable authors, or a super digitally influential company, MediaWhiz.”

Below is an excerpt of the article.

SEO in 2013: The Rising Influence of AuthorRank
By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO | @MarcPurtell

When considering major trends that will impact SEO in 2013 it’s clear that AuthorRank will play an increasingly important role in marketers’ search and SEO strategies.

PageRank has long been the standard high-level metric used to identify the relative quality of a Web page. There is arguably limited value in using PageRank as a quality metric over the last few years, but it can still be meaningful in conjunction with other quality metrics (i.e. domain authority, page authority, etc.)

In 2013 a new quality metric will take the spotlight when it comes to page quality and search engine ranking. This metric is affectionately known as AuthorRank (or Agent Rank, according to Google’s patent).

Here’s why AuthorRank will help reshape SEO in 2013:

AuthorRank: A Brief Overview
Content quality, as measured by search engines, is no longer based solely on the authority of a domain or Web page. It is increasingly based on the reputation and authority of the individual that authored the content. This reputational score grades authors on the Web and used that grade when ordering natural search engine results.

Read the full piece at Search Engine Journal.

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The post MediaWhiz Honored with ‘Best of Search Engine Journal’ Award appeared first on MediaWhiz.

By Marc Purtell | @MarcPurtell | Director, SEO

Every webmaster’s and SEO professional’s nightmare is seeing a sudden plummet of those hard-earned Google rankings. The chaos that ensues in trying to pinpoint just what happened is never a welcomed experience.

The good news is that Google has been as transparent as ever in recent months. It offers new information, tools and methods to help webmasters beg for mercy, such as Webmaster Tools alerts, re-inclusion requests and the Link Disavow tool.

Begging for mercy isn’t always the best course of action, however, depending on the circumstances of the issues surrounding the drop in ranking. It should be a last resort once you have identified the reason for the issues with a great deal of certainty, done everything possible to resolve the issues and still don’t see a positive result. In order to take the right course of action after a Google manual review, the first step is to know if a manual review actually took place.

Google Transparency

Within Google Webmaster Tools, Google has been providing alerts when issues that might impact site performance are detected. Anything from server errors to important pages being blocked in a robots.txt file to noticeable traffic drops to the dreaded detection of unnatural inbound links are reported to those with owner-level access of the Webmaster Tools account. This provides webmasters insight into whether a manual review actually occurred.

To put the level of transparency Google began to project in 2012 into perspective, the number of messages sent through Webmaster Tools in January and February alone surpassed all messages from 2011.

Algorithm Update vs. Manual Review

When a website experiences a sudden drop in rankings, the first reaction of those responsible for the site is often to try to make an immediate case to Google. SEO pros assume that a manual review took place, submit a re-inclusion request to Google, tell them how great their site is and expect Google to agree.

This is a dangerous practice. In many cases, the webmaster fails to understand that a routine algorithm update caused the blip in his rankings, which a re-inclusion request will not remedy. In doing so, he unintentionally invites Google to scrutinize the website and inbound-link profile. This gives Google an opening to find something more damaging on your site than the initial bot.

When experiencing a drop in search rankings, it’s necessary to research and understand if there were any impactful changes in Google’s algorithm and map the timeline of the ranking drop to the recent updates. Jumping ahead to a re-inclusion request can lead to additional penalties, de-indexing, etc.  In the worst-case scenarios, it can lead to an actual manual review of your site.

The correct plan of action is to understand how the site violates any recent algorithm updates and take the necessary steps to comply.

There is no benefit to submitting a re-inclusion request if your website wasn’t manually reviewed by Google. If a request is submitted, Google responds with a Webmaster Tools notification stating, “There’s no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team”.

Submitting a Re-Inclusion Request

Before submitting a re-inclusion request, it must be established that a manual review occurred and that everything possible has been done to clean up the website.

The easiest, and most certain, way to know if your site has been manually reviewed is to receive a Google Webmaster Tools alert. The best case of a bad scenario is that Google will inform you why your website is no longer ranking. If that doesn’t happen, deeper digging is necessary.

Below is an example of the type of communications you should expect to receive from Google when submitting a re-inclusion request.

Perhaps, for example, there have been no known relevant algorithm updates but the site was engaged in unnatural linking practices. Because the most common reason for a manual review is the detection of unnatural links, the link profile of the website must be analyzed to identify potential spam links or trends that would appear unnatural.

Once links that violate Google’s guidelines are identified, all attempts must be made to remove any and all questionable links. This includes reaching out to the webmaster(s) hosting the links and requesting removal. All attempts to remove links should be documented to include in the re-inclusion request.

Google further assisted webmasters by releasing the Link Disavow tool in October. This handy tool can be found in Webmaster Tools when logged in. This is a way to tell Google about any low-quality links you have attempted to have removed to no avail. It does not guarantee that Google will turn the other cheek on those links. Instead, Google’s Link Disavow tool should be used as a means of informing Google when an attempt has been made.

The Link Disavow tool should be used with caution. Webmasters need a high level of certainty that the links are harming the site and all attempts have been made to remove the links.

Only after all site issues in non-compliance with Google’s quality guidelines have been identified and cleaned up should a re-consideration request be filed. This can be done by logging into Google Webmaster Tools and accessing this page. Be sure to detail all attempts made to clear up any issues within the request. Once submitted, it can take weeks or months before any improvements in rank or correspondences from Google occur.

In the meantime, the best thing to do is continue creating quality content for the site and staying in line with Google’s quality guidelines.

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The post How to Rebuild Your Site After a Google Manual Review appeared first on MediaWhiz.

There’s no doubt that performance marketing is a significant force in online marketing, and will continue to grow. What will 2013 have in store for the performance marketing industry?  As I see it, there are four key trends that will influence performance marketers’ work in the new year:

1. More brands will invest in performance marketing. The 2012 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report indicates that more than two-thirds of all marketing transactions will be paid for on a performance basis. Total U.S. spend on performance marketing will grow by almost $5 billion, to $25 billion in online advertising revenue, versus 2011 spend. This indicates that performance marketing will continue to dominate the online ad-spend model. Brands that consistently miss their online marketing ROI targets will comprise the majority of new spend on performance marketing campaigns, as they seek to take advantage of the industry’s guaranteed results. Traditional agencies will continue to focus on branding for their clients in the digital space, and farm out performance marketing budgets to trusted affiliate networks and marketers.

2.  Lead quality and compliance take center stage. As brands continue to invest their marketing dollars in performance marketing, they will place increasing pressure on performance marketers to achieve their investment goals. The SaaS and lead quality product market will blossom. These two dynamic sectors of online markets will help advertisers pay for only top-quality leads, enabling performance marketers to get paid appropriately for such quality. The government will continue to get involved in online marketing regulations, such as Do Not Track legislation, and more states will attempt to pass nexus tax laws. Efforts will likely be minimally intrusive, and the industry will push for self-regulation efforts as a means to limit involvement.

3. Mobile lead-gen has its moment in the sun. Mobile marketing will become a much larger piece of the advertising budget in 2013. eMarketer forecasts 138 million smartphone users in the U.S. next year, comprising 43% of the total population. It will be critical for advertisers to optimize websites and create shorter lead-generation forms with click-to-call for mobile devices. In our “always on” world, consumers need instant gratification from the brands they allow into their online world. Advertisers that provide consumers with access to immediate customer service will win their business.

4. Consolidation of media channels. A larger premium will be placed on internal media sources to provide quality and consistency. As such, the lead-generation industry will see a continued and more aggressive consolidation of affiliate networks. Many affiliates will merge with or acquire one or more of their affiliate media sources. Specifically, many mailers and media buyers will join forces with networks to increase margin, reduce compliance risk and deliver on allocated budget to survive and create a competitive advantage.

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The post 2013 Performance Marketing Trends appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Editor’s note: The following post was originally published at CMO.com. 

Long dismissed as a niche form of online marketing, performance marketing has become a multibillion-dollar force in the digital-media ecosystem. For CMOs, performance marketing, of which affiliate marketing comprises the largest share of revenue growth, is no longer a marketing strategy that can be ignored or delegated to junior-level marketing managers. It is now a driving force behind many brands’ online growth and customer-acquisition efforts. As such, it requires CMOs’ devout attention to properly use and scale in order to realize long-term customer-acquisition value.

The rise of affiliate marketing, and its growing influence with digital marketers, is no accident.

Affiliate marketing has existed for more than a decade. It helps advertisers achieve their ROI goals by using publishers (affiliates) to conduct their marketing efforts via multiple media channels on a pay-for-performance basis.

Affiliate marketing can be used for any vertical, brand, company, language, time frame, or demographic. Importantly, it is a useful testing ground for CMOs who desire online marketing channel options, instant gratification, speed, and a clear measurement of return on advertising spend (ROAS) or return on marketing (ROM) investment. In fact, many affiliate marketers are experts in industry metrics and traffic sources, and can help CMOs develop campaigns based on long-term brand and customer-acquisition. This is critical as the industry evolves into a larger mobile-consumer target.

But affiliate marketing’s benefits extend beyond lead generation. Affiliate marketing professionals and networks are at the forefront of innovative online marketing campaigns. The rise of social networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pandora, were largely built on affiliate marketing ad spend revenues.

Every brand in the digital age needs a strong lead-generation component to its online marketing strategy. Affiliate marketing is CMOs’ answer to that need.

Read the rest of the article at CMO.com. 

The benefits of affiliate marketing are more thoroughly explained in a new MediaWhiz insight paper from, “The CMO’s Guide to Affiliate Marketing.” It outlines critical steps CMOs should take to begin working with an affiliate; defines core terminology; and information on why it is critical for CMOs to invest some of their marketing spend in the affiliate marketing channel.

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The post A CMO’s Guide To Affiliate Marketing appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Will “nonline” shopping help thrwart the negative retail effects of showrooming?

By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications

As the 2012 holiday shopping season heats up, one trend many marketers and analysts will closely monitor is the concept of “showrooming.” Showrooming occurs when consumers try out merchandise in stores then go online to buy them, often at a discounted price.

Fifty-six percent of American consumers are expected to participate in some aspect of showrooming this holiday season, according to Mobile Marketer.

Showrooming is driving many brick-and-mortar retailers crazy as they attempt to thwart the effects of Amazon and other online retailers on their bottom line. It’s also causing several well-known global retail giants, including Best Buy, to seriously rethink the physical size and make-up of their stores.

So what’s a savvy retailer marketer to do in the wake of showrooming’s rise and dominance of commerce?

The marketing geniuses at Google might just have the answer. After surveying 1,500 holiday consumers about their shopping habits, Google has found that the “lines between online and offline commerce are blurring,” according to Direct Marketing News. Google details these findings in its recently released Pre-Holiday 2012 Consumer Intentions study.

Despite dire predictions within marketing ranks that consumers would start to skip physical stores entirely in favor of online shopping, Google’s study finds that isn’t the case. In fact, the distinction between online and offline shopping are disappearing.

The concept is called “nonline” shopping. And it may harken the next great wave in-store shopper marketing.According to the Google study, 51 percent of surveyed consumers intend to research a product online and visit the store to buy it; 32 percent plan on researching an item online, inspecting it in the store and then retreating back online to complete the transaction.

“I think the whole concept of nonline is customers are connected to brands at all times of the day, and they’re going to choose how they want to interact and, at the end of the day, purchase,” Brett Goffin, Google’s retail head of industry, told DMNews. “The retailers who understand that are going to be ones in the long-term that, we believe, are going to succeed.”

‘Nonline’ Shopping’s Lessons for Marketers

The Google study presents a multitude of insights for digital and shopper marketers.

According to Google’s Goffin two factors are contributing to the blurring of offline and online shopping: consumers’ rising comfort with online shopping and their decreased fears over online credit-card fraud.

Consumers are increasingly going to a physical store to become more educated about a product – to touch it, play with it and see how it works in their hands. Shoppers then go online to comparison shop for deals. They will either make a purchase online or go back to the store where they first became comfortable with the product and make their purchase there.

The question becomes, What can retailers do to take advantage of nonline shoppers?

To be sure, there are several facets of online shopping that likely will remain immune to the growth of “nonline” shopping. And the actual impact of “nonline” shopping may be negligible in light of the fact that an increasing percentage of Americans make their purchase decisions online – whether through message boards, social media or a brand’s website.

But in an era where the very concept of having a big, physical store to show off expensive, one-time purchases is called into question, the growth of “nonline” shopping is surely a comfort to many reatilers. It presents a new opportunity for digital marketers who are already envisioning a world in which the online and offline mix interchangeably. That world will likely include some form of “nonline” shopping.

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The post ‘Nonline’ Shopping: The Next Great Digital Marketing Opportunity appeared first on MediaWhiz.

If you’re looking for an edge (and who isn’t) check out Website Magazine‘s interview of Jeremy Leonard, the SVP of Strategy and Operations at digital media agency MediaWhiz and a real whiz when it comes to conversion optimization.

Numerous well-known names fill the MediaWhiz client roster including Nielsen, Home Depot, Discover and many others – and Leonard’s experience with these brands and their challenges shines through in the interview below, providing Website Magazine readers with compelling insights into high-level lead generation and conversion optimization, some guidance on the debate over form length, and how traffic quality and mobile devices are forcing advertisers to shift their approach quickly.

WM: FOR THOSE IN OUR AUDIENCE THAT AREN’T FAMILIAR WITH MEDIAWHIZ, DISCUSS THE AGENCY’S ROLE IN THE DIGITAL LANDSCAPE.

JL: MediaWhiz is an integrated digital media agency that works with brands to help them more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers. Clients include a broad range of leading advertisers such as Unilever, Nielsen, CarpetONE, The Lasik Vision Center, Home Depot, Discover and First PREMIER Bank.

Historically an online performance marketing agency we have evolved into a digital customer acquisition agency focused on direct response and lead generation. We have practice areas in affiliate marketing, search, creative display advertising, email, data acquisition and social media.

WM: WHY SHOULD AN AGENCY (OR ANYONE) BE CONCERNED WITH CONVERSION OPTIMIZATION WITHIN LEAD GENERATION SPECIFICALLY?

JL: Great question with several compelling answers:

Everyone should be concerned with conversion optimization for a very simple reason: consumer traffic to your website isn’t free. Even if your site traffic is coming from SEO or Facebook “Likes,” you spend time and money to generate that traffic. Marketers should naturally demand a return on that investment. That ROI should be in the form of consumers completing a specific call-to-action. In the world of lead generation, that call-to-action will be in the form of a qualified lead or sale.

Some advertisers may look at lead generation specifically and think, “Well, I’m only paying a publisher for a lead – why would I need to go to the trouble of making a site optimize properly? I don’t pay for anyone who doesn’t convert.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. Performance-based lead generators have hundreds of advertising offers that they can run to their display inventory, drop to their email lists or make SEM bids. The offer represented by your website is no better than if the publisher can’t generate a fair return on its media investment.

Poorly converting sites will result in a high number of clicks but a low number of leads; this instantly tells the publisher that the problem is not with its traffic but with your site. Your offer will be taken out of rotation, and you will be lucky if anyone sends traffic to your site again.

Read the rest of the interview here. 

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The post Need Better Leads? Ask a Conversion Optimization Whiz appeared first on MediaWhiz.

Programmatic buying and premium display advertising were a big a topic of discussion this week at MediaPost’s OMMA Premium Display conference. Keith Trivitt, director of marketing and communications at MediaWhiz, moderated a panel, “Battling The Transformers – Can Media Maintain Its Value Against The New Ad Machine?” which focused on the state of premium display advertising among high-end publishers.

The panel was stacked with an all-star cast of speakers, including:

• Andrew Sollinger, Managing Director, The Americas, Financial Times
• Jason Oates, President, LiveIntent
• Bill Rowley, SVP, Business Development & Publishing, Martini Media
• Kathryn Kulik, Global SVP, Media Sales, CBS Interactive
• Kristine Welker, Chief Revenue Officer, Hearst Magazines Digital Media

Key Takeaways

• Premium display advertising is clearly helping publishers and advertisers adapt to their customers’ needs.
• Programmatic buying will not be completely eliminated from a company’s budget.
• The appropriate balance must be found between publishers using programmatic buying to sell their low-end display inventory and meeting the high end of the premium online advertising market.
• According to the Andrew Sollinger, managing director, The Americas, of the Financial Times, the biggest issue for publishers will be “moving [advertisers] from programmatic to premium.”
• Although ad exchanges and networks are beneficial to high-end publishers, the best way to keep advertisers happy it to focus on what they want; and what they want is premium display advertising that is designed with value to the consumer in mind.
  

  High-end publishers and brands continue to value premium display advertising, even as the sector gets squeezed at the margins.

Here’s a recap of what was a spirited 45-minute discussion about premium display advertising.

Programmatic Buying: Friend or Foe?

While all panelists agreed that programmatic buying is an important, if not vital, aspect of the business, they differed on its impact on the value of premium display advertising. “Custom premium is here to stay,” noted the FT’s Sollinger.

Through the discussion the point being driven is that premium display advertising is focused on the consumer and provides content that both consumers and advertisers want. “Premium display starts with the consumer or it won’t work. Ad experience needs to be built around the customer,” according to Katerine Kulik, global senior vice president of media sales at CBS Interactive’.

The Reader/Viewer is King

The consumer-centric focused of publishers’ high-end premium display inventory has provided brands with a much better experience when advertising through premium display, which has led to increased demand in recent years for premium display, especially custom content.

Bill Rowley, Martini Media’s senior vice president of business development and publishing, explained the growth in demand for premium display: “[Our] customers (brands) want great ideas. Custom display is a challenge, but we are seeing more requests for it.

The Value of Premium Display Advertising

With requests for premium display growing, the big question is, How is premium display valued? Do marketers place the value? Upper management? Or is the value of premium display derived from what the market – i.e., consumers of media content – will bear?

According to Kristine Welker, chief revenue officer of Hearst Magazines Digital Media Group, “Data and technology helps put the value of premium display in focus.” The value of premium display is in the area where consumers find the most value, not the producer. By following the data, businesses can take advantage of the value their premium display advertising might offer.  

What exactly creates a value for premium display? “Scarcity creates premium,” said LiveIntent’s Jason Oates; an important point to consider as to why premium display is so valuable. For example, in the early days of premium display publishers tried to drive traffic to where they were advertising. That has become increasingly difficult with the rise of “side door” media consumption in which consumers come to content through a variety of means, primarily social media.

Hearst’s Welker described how her company was under pressure to optimize and monetize side-door traffic and how they eventually adjusted to the phenomenon. “We were under constant pressure trying to drive traffic to our sponsored areas. It wasn’t working, so we had to adjust our content to where the user wanted to be,” said Welker.

With more customers finding publishers’ content through side doors, businesses and advertisers are forced to adapt. “No matter where the user comes in you want to message them in the appropriate way. The brand message should follow them wherever they come from on the site,” said Katerine Kulik, global senior vice president of media sales at CBS Interactive.

If this panel discussion made one thing clear it is that premium display advertising is very much alive and well and has a prosperous future.

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