Hi my name is Dan Fradin and I’m a Group Director for R/GA. R/GA is a full service digital agency headquartered in NY with offices around the world, including here in Austin. We’re mainly known for great creative and building platforms, sites and digital events. Though, over the last few years, we’ve quietly gained a reputation for performance advertising, always blending the art and science of media and creative together. Personally, I’m excited to be here because I went to the first Exchange Summit and walked out with the idea of Banner Monkey, and, now, at the second summit, I get to reveal it publicly. The idea was based off of a common theme that I heard in Miami. [next slide]
Relevancy rules. I think as marketers we can all agree that relevancy is essential. [next slide]
And data is the foundation of that. Take for instance our very own Digiday CEO, Nick Friese. He’s been taking advantage of data. In fact, for his company’s latest promo video, he looked to recent google trends data for inspiration. [next slide]
It’s all about relevancy. In Miami and afterwards, whenever I spoke with advertisers, media and ad tech folks, they all pointed to a similar point of frustration. All this data is being used to find and target audiences but usually the same message is served to their customers. It’s not for lack of desire. Everyone wants relevancy: marketers and consumers. Now, I’d bet, though maybe not my kids, I’d definitely bet my dog – a kinda weird looking pug - that 99% of the folks in this room that touch media, serve the same message to all consumers. Why is that? It seemed to boil down to three things … [next slide]
Process: how to actually pull this off since it seems complicated. Timing: every campaign seems like it’s short on time and deadlines don’t often move. Budgets: it can be expensive to build lots of versions of ads plus you have dynamic ads serving costs. So, after the first summit, I went back and scoped out Banner Monkey with our Prototyping department and quickly had a proof of concept. [next slide]
From there, we rolled out in beta which allowed us to work out a bunch of kinks. [next slide]
And, just a couple of months ago, we did our official soft launch. Out of the gate, we had a number of existing clients start using Banner Monkey with more already planned. We’ve also been winning business in the US and globally because of the tool. The reason is that it solves those three earlier challenges… [next slide]
To solve the process challenge and actually make this easy, efficient and effective, we turned to search. It’s a mature channel and is similar in many ways. Things that you’ve been used to for years in search like building out matrixes for keywords, copy, URLs, is something you’d do with this process. It’s not recreating the wheel but building off of a well-established foundation. [next slide]
When it comes to timing, Banner Monkey allows us to build out ads quickly. We can build 10’s or 100’s of version in minutes, quickly reacting to market conditions or putting out time-sensitive offers. Or, simply, meeting a tight deadline. [next slide]
I worked in rich media for almost 8 years, and I know that dynamic ads that provided relevant messages usually outperformed singular message standard ads. But, it was always hard to justify the return on the media spend when rich media is 5, 6 or 7 times the cost of standard ads. With Banner Monkey, you build the ads ahead of time and then use any ad server to deliver standard ads that are now relevant. [next slide]
We’ve positioned this tool with advertisers so that it works with or without your current agency relationships. Whatever your vertical, if you are looking to make your display work harder, I’d love to talk with you. We also have a few other folks from R/GA here as well. Would you mind standing up? Thank you and enjoy the rest of the event. [fin]
