The Ins and Outs of Content Recommendation
Kristina: How is Content Recommendation different for marketers from other digital ad segments?
Pamela Becker, CMO, WhizzCo: Over the last decade, marketers have become accustomed to buying media via real-time bids on open programmatic markets. Programmatic technology has made online advertising more transparent and fair for advertisers, publishers, and platforms alike.
Content recommendation works differently. Here, many publishers sign exclusive contracts with a single content recommendation. Though advertisers do bid through auctions to serve ads, the bidding is among the content recommendation vendor’s advertisers, and even the winning bidder won’t know what their effective CPC needs to be to win the auction nor how much ad inventory is available – all things which are known in traditional programmatic auctions.
Therefore, advertisers are unable to optimize their bidding in content recommendation like they can in traditional programmatic bidding.
Kristina: What strategies can marketers implement to achieve their marketing goals with this method?
Pamela: Most content recommendation vendors, particularly the market leaders, provide advertisers with sophisticated contextual and interest-based targeting options. However, since many publishers have exclusive agreements with one vendor, in order to achieve broad reach, advertisers should work with several content recommendation vendors.
Kristina: Are there alternatives in the market?
Pamela: The truth is that the content recommendation market is slowly opening up. First, some vendors are enabling publishers to work with more than one content recommendation vendor. Second, new companies, like WhizzCo, use predictive algorithms to determine which content recommendation vendor’s ad will deliver the greatest revenue for the publisher and the greatest relevancy for the advertiser.
These market changes should make content recommendations operate in a similar manner to the other 85% of online advertising, where, according to data from IPONWEB, ads are served via real-time programmatic auctions. But we’re still several years and market changes from that.
