The drama in programmatic online advertising

In times of adversity, online advertising routines fail. Drastically

The above example of an inappropriate display ad is just one in a range of similar advertising anomalies following the crash of Germanwings flight 4U9525 in March 2015. In the hours and days after such events, newspapers witness an increased online traffic to their websites and reports about the disasters in particular. Unfortunately, such reports are often accompanied by inappropriate advertising. Similarly, users of social media often encounter those ads at those times. Conversations on social media about such inappropriate ads often blame either the websites (i.e., news outlets) or the advertisers. But whose fault is it anyway? How should we understand this? And most important, how should different stakeholders within the online advertising business prepare themselves to avoid such mistakes in the future?

Consumers’ expected quality of high discount daily deal services

Below is a guest post by Sanne Meussen, who studied consumer responses to daily deal websites in her master's thesis (which I supervised). Apart from the to-be-expected preference for higher discounts on such websites, she also found some evidence that there is a hidden danger to these high discounts...

Even though Groupon has lost $10 billion of its market value in less than one year, the number of subscribers is still growing. Apparently, consumers are still interested in high discount deals on daily deal websites. Why wouldn’t they, if they can eat a first-class meal at a local restaurant with a 75% discount? Groupon even points out: ‘we want each Groupon purchase to feel too good to be true’.

How "frictionless" is killing its darlings

One of the next hypes in social media will be frictionless sharing (see, e.g., Polle de Maagt). Whereas traditional sharing is fun and social, but cumbersome or time-consuming, frictionless sharing implies automatic sharing activities. In fact, lots of social network users are already sharing frictionless. For instance, with an automated link between LinkedIn or Facebook and Twitter, or with an automated Spotify sharing on one's Facebook account. Marketers now seem to massively dig into the frictionless idea, presumably because the less cumbersome sharing could increase eWOM (electronic Word-Of-Mouth). Or maybe they are just creating future job opportunities, because frictionless sharing might, in the longer term, kill a lot of the appeal of social networks to marketers.

Schizophrenia: an online marketing disease

Two snippets of online marketing facts got some attention recently and, when tied together, they make the job of a well-done integrated online marketing campaign a work of geniuses, or schizophrenics. Well, in fact, it is not just snippets. We are talking about major moves of the two major online marketing platforms, namely Google and Facebook.