Replacing the Top-Down Mindset With Bottom-Up Response

Al Ries, who wrote one of the seminal books on marketing with Jack Trout years...

June 12, 2013

Weather or Not…Using Local Conditions to Make Ads Better

What’s going on outside your door or what the prognosticators are calling for to fall...

May 28, 2013

May Audience Cost Calendar Show Careers and Travel Continue to be in Demand

ChoiceStream’s most recent Audience Cost Calendar is now available. The Audience Cost Calendar was created...

May 24, 2013

A Letter from the CEO

I have just started my second week as CEO of ChoiceStream. What a fantastic and...

May 16, 2013

Ad Operations, ChoiceStream, Creative Services

Replacing the Top-Down Mindset With Bottom-Up Response

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Al Ries, who wrote one of the seminal books on marketing with Jack Trout years ago entitled “Positioning: the Battle for Your Mind,” has submitted a challenge to big company marketers and C-level execs to stop “top-down thinking.” Ries states this type of thinking – where marketers and brands push seemingly indistinguishable products – is leading to consumer confusion, disloyalty and ultimately lost profits. “Quit thinking like an executive and start thinking like a consumer.” In AdAge Ries urges these big company types to “Quit thinking like an executive and start thinking like a consumer.” Ries writes “Clearing up customer confusion [is vital]. Most customers don’t want to waste time picking out absolutely the best and cheapest product on the market. They just want to make a good choice.” He calls on marketers and C-level execs alike to put themselves “in the place of customers and [try] to figure out

read MORE

ChoiceStream, Creative Services

Weather or Not…Using Local Conditions to Make Ads Better

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

What’s going on outside your door or what the prognosticators are calling for to fall from the skies over the next few days has always been a catalyst for purchases of foul weather gear or apparel and accessories to beat the heat. Yours truly bought an $800 5,500 watt generator last Fall when the forecasters were calling for Hurricane Sandy to make landfall somewhere west of Boston. I haven’t had to use it yet, but the memory of the freak pre-Halloween snow and ice storm a few years back when my home was plunged into darkness for a few days certainly made my purchase decision easier. And of course, there’s another famous example: some guy named Noah who built a large boat and acquired a ton of animals when the chief meteorologist predicted 40 days and nights of rain. But I digress. What we’re saying is that the weather can

read MORE

Analytics, Marketing

May Audience Cost Calendar Show Careers and Travel Continue to be in Demand

Friday, May 24, 2013

ChoiceStream’s most recent Audience Cost Calendar is now available. The Audience Cost Calendar was created to help media buyers and marketers understand trends in the cost of various online audiences. The monthly review of average segment costs showed that last month (April) the Index spread was closer, between 74 and 140. April’s data and highlights show that the top traded audience segments included Careers, Travel and Holidays & Events. Once again, as in March, Careers: Customer Service remained the top performing segment with a 40% increase above the average price for that targeted inventory. Bill Guild, our VP product management & marketing believes the Cost Calendar results could may in fact convey some good economic news noting “In previous Audience Cost Calendar reports it seemed that specific audience segments changed specific to cyclical trends, [but] for the past two months, the top ranked segment, Careers: Customer Service, remained consistent. Hopefully

read MORE

ChoiceStream, Leadership

A Letter from the CEO

Thursday, May 16, 2013

I have just started my second week as CEO of ChoiceStream. What a fantastic and humbling experience! I wanted to share with all of you some of my thoughts about the company, mission and values. First, my becoming CEO of ChoiceStream marks the completion of the company’s transformation from personalization software vendor to a full-service advertising engine for agencies and brands. It really is the culmination of 12 years of research on predicting consumer’s needs online now applied to a much bigger canvas than just onsite personalization. With the transformation to an advertising based business we can take ChoiceStream’s original mission of creating relevant and personalized experiences for consumers to the entire internet. Our mission is simple: To make the Internet a better place via more relevant advertising. “Consumers Choose. You Win.” is our tag line. It captures the essence of what we are trying to do: engaging with consumers

read MORE

ChoiceStream

Agency Trading Desks and the Quest for Transparency, Actionable Insights and Real ROI

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

A recent article in AdWeek regarding Interpublic and how the agency plans to move 50% of its media buying to its own Agency Trading Desk is interesting in its own right. However when viewed through the broader lens of agency trading desks as a whole, the subject definitely is intriguing. Agency Trading Desks (lets call them ATDs) by design are where the “best and brightest” media minds within an agency – those who are focused on digital media buying – go to add value to the agency’s media buying operation while helping the agency, through consolidation and scale, secure the best inventory through programmatic media buying thatdelivers the results that clients demand. Forrester Research has defined ATDs as “A centralized, service-based organization that serves as a managed service layer, typically on top of a licensed demand-side platform (DSP) and other audience buying technologies;manages programmatic, bid-based media and audience buying.” ATDs

read MORE

ChoiceStream, Engineering

Does This New Cage Make My Data Look Big?

Wednesday, April 10, 2013

We’ve spent some time this Spring in the cage. However, unlike our hometown Boston Red Sox, our time in the cage doesn’t have anything to do with hitting. Instead, we spent that time preparing for opening day by rolling out our new continuously-processing backend. We’re hosting our new data platform built on Twitter’s Storm distributed computing framework and on HBase for our user profile and complex event data. Kafka will have its own cluster for feeding Storm and ZooKeeper will keep everything coordinated. All of these improvements in our cage will translate into faster processing and optimization for our advertising solutions that are powering campaigns for some of today’s biggest brands like Zappos.com. The prevailing industry trend is to eliminate cages in order to take advantage of the cloud for all deployments. To that point, ChoiceStream has utilized Amazon AWS for years for development and production. Yet, we also believe

read MORE

Analytics, ChoiceStream, Marketing

Managing Metrics: Gross Rating Points Go Digital

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

GRP or Gross Ratings Points is a metric almost universally applied to television advertising. As more advertisers begin to bring brand spend online, it is becoming common practice to run campaigns across both offline an online media. In response to this advertisers will need a metric which allows them to compare the effect and efficiency of their campaigns across channels. There have been some attempts to address this need by applying GRP metrics to measure the reach of impression based media. Online GRPs work on direct wholesale placements in much the same way they work on TV. The buyer commits to all or a portion of specific placements, then the number of impressions and the audience skew are fed into the formula. However, the GRP formula comes up short in attempts to measure other types of impression based buys. The Wikipedia definition of GRPs is clear and concise, and it

read MORE

« Older posts