Why Obfuscation Can't Last

Place your bets behind the curiosity of the people spending the money

My boss confidently strode into the conference room and gingerly placed a manila folder on the end of the table.  The folder was positively bulging with loose pieces of paper.  One of them was a telling pale green color, marred by scribbled notes and yellow highlighter – a highly marked-up BPA audit statement.  One did not need to know what was highlighted on that statement to understand the simple truth that this would be a long meeting.

She and I were meeting with the head of sales from a business publication we advertised in so that we could reach a specific population of healthcare specialists.  What that sales head was able to discern from the highlighted audit statement – even before the meeting formally began – was that we were going to have a conversation about how many of those professionals they really were reaching.

But it was the part of the hand that my boss hadn’t tipped that was the kicker. We knew details of their print production process that other agencies might have paid little attention to.  In the folder was a spreadsheet that calculated cost percentage increases that were tied to paper costs.  There was another that tallied up cost savings from some of the production changes we had observed in the publication over the past year – changes in binding method, paper stock and finish, and other details.  Yet another showed how many times the publication had fallen short on audience guarantees.

That meeting was over before it started.

Buyers are naturally curious

Last week, we discussed how obfuscation of details has historically paid off for the walled gardens, and how that can’t last forever.  Obfuscation is temporary, and I’m telling you the story about this meeting with a print magazine seller to illustrate one of the reasons why - buyer curiosity.

A good media buyer knows how the end product is delivered.  In some cases, they know as much or even more than the people selling it.

With print publications in the pre-Internet days, that meant knowing details of how a magazine was put together.  It meant following trends in that business to see where publishers were saving money with desktop publishing software or getting hammered due to paper cost increases. 

All of this curiosity and market knowledge paid off at the negotiating table, because buyers could easily understand which proposed cost increases were illusory and which were very real.  We had a realistic, market-tested view of what it cost to deliver the editorial product, we passed that knowledge on to our clients – to the extent their own curiosity would tolerate it – and we saved them money while governing advertising partnerships with a ‘trust but verify’ approach that worked for everybody.

But digital…

In digital, there’s a lot more to uncover in order to truly understand how content, utility and community are extended to digital media consumers.  Instead of poring over audit statements, we’re digging into the ad tech tax or calculating unduplicated reach.  We look at viewability, engagement, sales lift and all sorts of other Key Performance Indicators to try to identify the parts of our media buys we ought to focus on, so that we can deliver effectiveness and a better Return on Investment.

Every morning, my youngest boy Jack watches Ssundee’s gaming videos.  On the weekday mornings when we get ready to walk to the bus stop, he shuts the TV off.  Our streaming setup is such that the TV is separated from the device doing the streaming, and that device doesn’t actually communicate with the TV.  Jack often comes home after school, turns the TV back on, and finds out that Ssundee videos have been streaming in the background all day, even though nobody can see them.

I often think about how the ads that nobody saw were counted.  Never mind that they’re impacting a 10-year-old boy for a second and focus on the notion that they’re streaming all day and the platform probably has no idea that those ads are not being viewed.  Advertisers would, of course, think of them as waste.

Lo and behold, I looked at a friend’s LinkedIn feed this morning and there are technical solutions meant to address a similar issue.

We’re always finding new details to scrutinize

The buy side is always curious about where digital investments can be made more efficient and effective, and a lot of that is driven by curiosity about how the product is made.  There are people who have built industry reputations on forensic-level understanding of how ad products are delivered.  They want to make things better, shine light on bad actors, and help the companies that are legitimately extending content and utility to people.

That’s a big reason why the deadly sin of obfuscation can’t last forever.  The people spending the money are naturally curious and when they turn that curiosity into insights, they make things more efficient.  I look at it as a fundamental truth of the media business - right up there with “dollars always follow the eyeballs” - that buyer scrutiny is a fundamental force in the business.

Won’t deliver the information buyers need?  Well, there’s always a way to buy around the media vehicles that fall into that category, even if they appear monolithic and impossible to ignore.

But there’s another big reason why obfuscation can’t last.  And it’s got even more to do with the kiddies.  We’ll talk about it next week.