Are Ad Buyers That Myopic?
Inhis ClickZ article Home Page Madness David Cohen writes about the increased demand for what he labels “primetime” placements: the home pages of AOL, MSN, and Yahoo! He compares home pages ads on these sites to Super Bowl ads, where the advertisers are driven by ego more than business metrics. Buyers looking for a mass audience in a short time look to these home page ads on the top properties, but then run into the issue of supply.
Basic economics make for limited supply, and when ad dollars rise (see yesterday’s postl), this makes for great times for the big three. With literally 1,000 opportunities (three sites x365 days) to advertise, rates are indeed sure to rise. Then the reports can come out that say that ad rates are up, and everybody talks about it some more, even though the driver may be these 1,000 placements!
Getting back to my title, the nearsightedness aspect is that it seems to me that too many buyers have their target on these few, limited buys and they do not pay enough attention to the broad channel buys they can make on all the mid tier sites. Sure, they will not get 50 million impressions from one buy on one site, but they could easily get this many impressions from a buy on a network or across multiple networks. And because these sites are not sold out from such a limited supply, rates should be lower than what they pay for placement on the big three home pages.
This is a win-win because advertisers can reach a better audience (they can target through the networks) for less, and the sites will make more money than they presently do with the dregs of remnant and ROS media buys that seem to dominate their space.
