Tips on how to plan and monitor your digital media placements to protect your advertising budget

Budgets are tight, so wouldn't you want to make sure your ad dollars are hitting your intended audience? Myles Rose, Digital Marketing Operations Manager for Gulf States Toyota shares some digital marketing tips to keep your ad buys safe and secure.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, VP of strategy at Savage Brands, and my guest today is Myles Rose, Digital Marketing Operations Manager at Gulf States Toyota. So, Myles, I am glad you’re back on Brandonomics.

You’ve been really sharing so much great information with us, and I’m not going to say that it’s like the “Wild West” out there in the digital marketing world, but sometimes it feels that way. So, I’m curious, there’s one challenge which is ad fraud, and I want to know how you’re dealing with that and all of the different issues around management, and regulation, and everything else that’s out there.

Myles: Absolutely, and I will call it the “Wild West,” because it is. If you’re not paying attention to all the items that can take money out of your media budget (Robin: They’ll rob you blind.) they will rob you blind, yeah. So, certainly, there’s viewability. Was my ad actually shown to a person versus a robot? Is it shown on a site that’s reputable, or is it on, you know, chinaflicks.tv, right? There’s not that many car buyers that are going to be on chinaflicks.tv, so they shouldn’t be sending traffic to my site. So there’s a lot of technology out there to try to combat this, but you, you know, they have to always be one step ahead of these fraudsters. Companies like Moat. We us a company called IAS: Integral Ad Science, and what they do is they go in and they say, alright, we’re having an ad bid. We have a person here on this site and we believe they’re an automotive intender, and we’re taking bids.

And then IAS comes in and says, “whoa, whoa, whoa,” that site was registered yesterday, and lives in, you know, East Germany, or wherever. That doesn’t exist anymore; in China, and we don’t really think that the impression’s going to be viewable. So, save your money; let’s not bid on this person, let’s go to the next one. So, items like that, the ad verifications really can save you a lot of money in your media budget.

Robin: I’m not going to imply that everyone out there’s out to get our money. Maybe I shouldn’t imply that, but if you were advising a fellow marketer, what would be the first thing you would tell them to look into to make sure that they are actually protecting their ad dollars?

Myles: Yeah, I think the first thing is, obviously, have an analytics on your campaign, right? And certainly geotarget, right? I don’t want my ads running all over the world when I only can sell cars in five states, things like that. And then, if you have the extra budget, go ahead and bring in an ad verification service just to make sure that, you know, do you want (Robin: Like a check and balance.) your ad on, I don’t want my ads on questionable content, on violence, and nudity, and things like that. I want to make sure that it’s family brand safe. That’s another big part for me that they provide. And then I’d also look at the authentication services. You know, you’ve got Facebook out there. I’m not saying there’s no fraud on Facebook, but certainly there’s less likelihood because I have to log in to that system, and that way I know it’s a real person.

Robin: Yeah. Well, what I took away from this is with all the systems out there, at least whether you decided to buy third party or not, be vigilant (Myles: Absolutely.). Pay attention.

Myles: You’ve got to look at it every day and you’ve got to be keeping up with the media, too, and the press just to see what new technologies are out there that can help combat some of this.

Robin: All right, well saving each ad out there; I appreciate that. This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside edition of top brands and their marketing strategies.