Here’s some food for thought as you consider just how smartly your marketing budget is being spent. Recently, a media buyer refused to place a buy on a site because the site’s content was deemed unsuitable. All well and good but then the same media buyer placed the same buy on a blind ad network (a buy that is made without knowing on which sites the ads will appear).
We bet you can guess what happened next. Yup. The ad appeared on the site that was deemed unsuitable because the blind ad network buys ads from the same, so-called unsuitable site. One, perhaps, can’t fault the buyer since they had no idea the ad would appear on the site they thought should not be part of the buy but doesn’t the entire blind buy thing seem idiotic? It’s like, “Hey, let’s throw some money at a stripper and see what sticks to her thong.” Not the most efficient use of one’s cash.
One might also thing a smart marketer would demand to have complete control over where and when their ads appear but blind ad networks are dirt cheap and sometimes impossible to pass up because they make the CPP and CPM look so good. It’s reduced a well thought out media buy into a simple, mindless math equation.
As much as this idiocy needs to be called out, perhaps it’s just a moot topic. After all the world’s biggest blind ad network is – you guessed it – Google. And Google is God when it comes to online advertising. Google’s Adwords and AdSense can seemingly do no wrong. Though from time to time they, too, serve up their own renditions of bufoonish contextual fuckery and blind buy surprises.
Is a low CPP and CPM so important as to continuously give up more and more control over where and in front of whom ads a marketers ads are placed? We don’t think so but, then again, we’re not buying media anymore. We just bitch about how it’s done.
