Letting Consumers Take Control of The Ads They See. An Interview with Joe Mandese.

As consumers take more control of who they allow into their viewing space, advertisers will have to be more cognizant of how their ads are delivered and received. Joe Mandese, Editor-in-Chief of MediaPost, has been working on an initiative called Bid/r which has the potential to change the ad delivery dynamic. 

Charlene Weisler: Over the next three years, what are the greatest changes facing the ad community?

Joe Mandese: Nigel Morris, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Dentsu Aegis Network, when asked the same question a few years ago, said, “The problem is we’ve shifted from an era of information scarcity to one of information ubiquity.” He meant that advertising originally evolved in a world of finite media options -- a handful of newspapers, magazines, TV and radio options -- where big advertisers and agencies had the leverage of their ad budgets to efficiently buy people’s attention. If you had enough money you could buy enough reach and frequency to scale people’s attention.

That started to break down with the explosion of media options in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to multichannel television. Today, literally every single human being on the planet is a media channel. The supply of media options is virtually unlimited. The signal-to-noise ratio between consumers and brands has grown out of whack, and to paraphrase Nigel Morris, we’ve shifted from a time when there was a scarcity of media to one when there’s a scarcity of human attention.

Weisler: What is Bid/r?

Mandese: Bid/r is a marketplace where brands can bid directly for a finite supply of the most valuable consumer attention: attention consumers want to pay to a brand.  Users download a simple app to “list” themselves on an exchange where they receive offers directly from brands. There is a cap on the amount of “inventory” they can trade to five minutes daily, because we want both consumers and brands to understand the scarcity and value of their attention. Consumers are in total control of their trades and brands only pay when the consumer fulfills 100% of the terms of the trade.

Brands can offer anything they want to win the user’s attention: samples, swag, unique experiences, access to media content, even cash and for any action they want the consumer to complete, not just paying attention to an ad, but higher order functions like visiting a brand’s site, downloading information, sampling a product, participating in research, enrolling in a loyalty program, etc.

From a consumer’s perspective, it’s like Tinder for brands. They see a feed of potential brands and swipe left or right depending on which ones they actually want to engage with. From a brand’s point-of-view, they might be looking to have a first date with a consumer or build a long-term, lasting relationship.

Weisler: Can the industry solve for ad blocking? For fraud? For viewability?

Mandese: Of course, but it comes down to defining what the industry means by “ad blocking,” “fraud” and “viewability.” Depending on how you define them, all of those problems have always existed for the advertising industry.

People have always had the ability -- with a few exceptions -- of controlling what ads they see or not. I used to quip that print media like newspapers and magazines were the original digital interactive media. If you saw an ad you didn’t like, you flipped the page. I remember seeing Brian Monahan (formerly at Walmart and now at Pinterest) present data on TV commercial zapping and said, “The biggest threat to our TV commercials is not the DVR, it’s people turning their heads.”

Right now, ad blockers are making it easier to skip ads, but we’re already seeing a new generation of anti-ad-blockers and even more recently a generation of anti-anti-ad-blockers. It’s as if the ad industry has entered into a rapidly escalating arms race with its own consumers.

Same with fraud. We have new jargon like “non-human traffic” or “non-viewable impressions,” but those behaviors always existed and it was just a question of how -- and how much -- they happened, not whether they happened. When I started covering the business, agencies had virtual armies of ad checkers to handle “discrepancy resolutions” for ads they were being charged for that never aired or aired in the wrong way. Those problems have always existed, and if anything, technology has made it easier for brands and agencies to detect them.

There are a number of promising blockchain technologies that will likely help, but it’s all premised on advertisers and agencies defining exactly what they want -- and don’t want -- and communicating it clearly as part of their contracts with the media.

Weisler: What metrics do you think are the most important indicator of a successful ad campaign?

Mandese: It comes down to what a brand and agency are trying to achieve with their ad campaign. It can be multiple things -- exposure, engagement, action, etc. -- but ultimately, they have to focus on one key indicator they use to measure performance.

I’m a big fan of time-spent and duration metrics, not just because it’s what Bid/r is premised on, but because I think it’s the best way to measure if a user was actually engaged with the ad campaign. What that duration should be, is up to different stakeholders -- brands, agencies, media, and yes, even consumers -- to hash out, but I think the time of using simple impressions or exposure-based metrics is over.

I think the Media Rating Council’s (MRC’s) new “digital audience-based measurement standards,” and the fact that they are duration-weighted, is a step in the right direction, because it creates an even playing field for all stakeholders participating in a measurement method that they all agree to. But ultimately, they have to agree about what they’re agreeing to measure.

This article first appeared in www.MediaVillage.com

Note:  Jack Myers and Charlene Weisler are both investors in Bid/r.  Joe Mandese was the editor of The Myers Report newsletter, the forerunner to MediaVillage.

Want to Find Out What You/r Really Worth?

I am re-posting Joe Mandese's article from Media Village on my blog here to help encourage enrollment in this fascinating project. Please consider joining.

Ten years ago, Joe Marchese and I collaborated on a special edition of MEDIA magazine exploring a single question:  Was advertising a mistake?  The idea was that the ad model that emerged after World War II was based on a scarcity of media that, increasingly, no longer existed -- and that a new model needed to emerge based on a new form of scarcity: the time and attention people spend with media.

Marchese had just launched an ambitious venture enabling brands to reward consumers that gave them their attention.  Ten years later, Fox acquired Marchese’s venture -- True[x] -- named Marchese head of advertising sales and has already begun shifting from an ad impressions-based model to one based on the quality and duration of time consumers spend with Fox’s shows and the brands that advertise on them.

Marchese helped solve the problem from the industry’s perspective.  I was inspired to try and solve it from the consumer’s point-of-view, and began developing Bid/r, a new marketplace in which consumers trade their own time and attention explicitly and transparently with brands.  With the blessing of Jack Myers, I am inviting you to be a part of the live market trial that will launch in the next few weeks.

Full disclosure:  Jack, Joe Marchese and a Who’s Who list of industry veterans are also angels backing Bid/r’s launch.  They include Dave Morgan, Andrew Susman, Alan Cohen, Russ Zingale, Sarah Faye, Ellen Oppenheim, Debbie Reichig, Mitch Oscar, Charlene Weisler, Dave Thomas, Bruce Dennler, Steve Farella, Mike Lotito and David Verklin.

Bid/r wouldn’t be launching now if it wasn’t for their support.  It won’t get much past that point if we don’t get the support of people like you.  That’s because Bid/r is a people-powered marketplace that depends on people trading something -- their own time and attention -- with others willing to give them something for it: brand marketers.

So what’s in it for you to participate in the market trial?

Well, aside from the goodwill of helping me, my partner Hagen Wenzek, our angels and advisors such as Brian Monahan, Carl Marci, Bob DeSena, Bryan Wiener, Marc Guldimann and Josh Engroff, you’ll help shape a marketplace people have been attempting to crack the code on for as long as people have been talking about the “attention economy.”

Beyond that, you’ll get a “listing” on an exchange controlled 100% by you and five minutes of “inventory” each day to trade with brands offering you explicit values -- samples, swag, content, experiences, even cash -- to trade it with them.

Many of the bids you’ll receive in your “bid feed” will be things you can find in the real world, but over time you’ll see some unique, interesting and valuable bids coming directly from brands targeting users on Bid/r.  These are the trades we’re most excited about testing, because in some cases they will be forms of value exchange that have never been explored between consumers and brands before.

The goal of the market trial is to prove Bid/r’s model -- a direct-to-consumer audience exchange based on people trading themselves like an equity -- works and to refine and improve it over time.
The market trial will last for two months.  Users can only trade up to five minutes of time daily.
We are only accepting 1,000 users for the trial, so please go to www.bid-r.com/installation and list yourself now.

The experience won’t be perfect, but with your help and feedback, Bid/r will become a marketplace based on the value of you.  So sign up and find out what you/r really worth.