I wrote a few weeks ago about the issues with performance marketing and display networks, especially with the focus of cost-per-action and cost-per-lead campaigns. As mentioned, I’ve been involved in both the CPA affiliate marketing business and the interactive brand marketing business and know both of them inside out. Also, as mentioned I see the benefits of both, but see that performance based marketing is the future of our industry, and all agencies need to wake up and start learning about this part of the industry immediately.

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If you read the comments from my friend Rob Cotter @ FixionMEdia, a boutique music ad network you’d get that he’s not a “huge fan of the CPA model, as marketers are vying for free advertising. If I’m reading The Economist, I don’t clip out a BMW ad and send it to their corporate HQ so they can pay The Economist for the lead. It’s ridiculous.” On the other side, we have Evan the CEO of Experience Advertising, who says that “Any media rarely backs into the target CPA… better focus on putting together CPA partnerships.” They are both going back into the whole debate of CPM vs. CPA, in which publishers will demand premium prices for their inventory, but marketers and a growing amount of agencies want accountability. Is it really CPA vs. CPM? Are the two worlds really that far apart? From the comments, you’d think that the two sides are at war and can’t come together.

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As the former owner of a Comscore rated display ad network, and now the manager of a major performance marketing network, I seem to have unique insight into how networks and performance/affiliate companies work. Before owning the major network, I was actually a multi-million dollar affiliate of my current company. I’ve a great deal of experience in making CPA-based campaigns work on “brand CPM” inventory – and the real issues in dealing with running CPA/Performance marketing campaigns on CPM display inventory. Thus, as part of my tireless mission to inform and educate the public with my brilliant analysis, here is the first of a two part series on the issues of CPA campaigns and display marketing. Read on!

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If you didn’t notice this morning (and well, I didn’t notice either), MediaPost published a long article of mine about the future of advertising networks. I was hoping that with all the work put into it, it was going to be a featured piece – instead it was regulated to the “opinion columns” along with the article “I love me some advertisng, long time.” That being said, I’m still happy that MediaPost published it. However, you might not have also noticed it because it generated so much buzz, that it crashed the MP servers!

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Interesting article at AdAge where Michael Learmonth claims that one of the issues facing the interactive advertising industry, is that there are too many people taking a piece of the pie. According to him, and some guy Tolman Geffs, from an investment bank I’ve never heard of, Agencies take .75 cents, ad network $2, data provider .75 cents, the ad exchange .25 cent and the ad server .25 cents.

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As expected, Facebook has announced that they stop serving ads from Microsoft. While my friends over there had little to comment, except that they were just trying to get better control over their inventory, this comes as facebook has slowly been removing all ad networks from displaying ads. From insiders in the company, here are the reasons they are removing ad networks in general.

1)      Too many issues with ad quality. They’ve had more than one ad network, including one rightmedia network (go figure?) display flashy, annoying “you won” banners.

2)      Issues with slowness. Many of the ads and ad code was slowing down the pages, and with the new design, they felt this would not be plausible to allow just any ad network on their pages.

3)      Issues with trojans/takeovers. They had several instances where ad networks were inserting pops, takeovers and Trojans into the banners.



First of all, before I get any emails from the SherpaCult: I love MarketingSherpa. The owner Anne Holland once claimed that she loved my writings and that I was the most influential dude in interactive advertising, so why wouldn’t I like them. MarketingSherpa is a great source for about anything – they know almost everything about anything in interactive media. I swear, somewhere in their archives they have a list of what toilet paper agency CEOs use. If Anne and Goeff Ramsey of emarketer had a baby, can you imagine? That being said, I have a serious problem with a chart that they came out with recently, which made some ridiculous claims about the growth of social media and worse, the death of display?

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