Today the marketing world finally got a chance to see AOL’s much-promoted One platform for cross-channel media planning and programmatic buying, and it had a few surprises in store.
The media company-turned-tech provider announced last March that it planned to combine its various ad buying technologies into one deeply integrated platform. Over the past year, AOL has worked to merge previous acquisitions like Adlearn Open Platform (for display ad buying), Marketplace (its RTB exchange solution), Adap.tv (for digital video and programmatic TV), and Convertro (attribution measurement).
It’s an ambitious project. AOL says One will be the first software platform to fully tie together display, video and TV ad buying. Not only will advertisers be able to measure campaign performance across digital and TV using combined budgeting and ROI metrics, they can use AOL’s multi-touch attribution technology to evaluate the relative performance of different media channels and messages, and plan future campaigns around that information.
And as with all ambitious projects, success doesn’t come overnight. Today marks the transition of AOL’s core programmatic buying properties, Adap.tv and AOP, to the new One branding and single sign-on interface. But for access to more advanced features, clients will have to wait. One’s data management and attribution measurement capabilities are live with beta partners only – the company still has some kinks to iron out before it releases the full platform to its general clientbase.
Tying together measurement and planning
The most anticipated feature of One will be its cross-channel attribution engine, built on technology AOL acquired when it bought advanced measurement firm Convertro last Spring. Although MTA is available from competitors like Google and Adobe, AOL claims that One will be the first platform to have MTA directly integrated into its media planning interface, so that real-time attribution data from previous and ongoing campaigns can be used immediately to plan future ones.
In a press demo on Monday, AOL Platforms chief technology officer Seth Demsey showed off the new attribution tools – and it was hard not to be impressed. One’s MTA engine measures the relative contribution of each individual ad, site and channel involved in a campaign, to determine whether the budget being spent on search (for example) could be more efficiently spent in programmatic TV. Thanks to data partnerships with TV data companies like Rentrak and Kantar, One can even analyze TV that has been bought the old-fashioned way, outside of the platform itself, and include that in its performance breakdown.
Based on which channels perform best on MTA analysis, One offers a large range of spend optimization and media mix suggestions within the planning interface.
One’s spend recommendations, showing its models for optimized media mix
Using a scenario-building tool, a media planner can create a hypothetical cross-channel campaign, with sliders for “email”, “TV”, “search” and about a dozen other channels, and model how the overall campaign will perform on a spend/return curve.
One’s scenario planner, showing sliders for media budget invested in each channel
“There are a lot of media companies and vendors that are telling clients what the ROI was on their platform. We really want to flip the script on this, and say the client should have a way to define what ROI is, and then apply that across all of their media buying channels, both online and offline,” Demsey said. “By having a single view of ROI across all channels, it’s going to make it significantly more efficient and effective to plan and execute media buys.”
Take your data home with you
Today is also the first time AOL’s new data management platform, One Audiences, is available to clients. Like any competitive programmatic DMP, Audiences provides the ability to create and target audience segments (e.g. “women aged 35-45 with two children in suburbia”) based on uploaded first-party data, AOL’s proprietary “second-party” data, or third-party data bought from wholesalers like BlueKai, which can be bought directly on the platform.
One’s DMP interface, showing how audiences can be created from 1st, 2nd and 3rd-party data
The main distinguishing feature for Audiences, however, is AOL’s commitment to its “open ecosystem” ethos. Audiences that have already been created and customized in another DMP, like Lotame or Exelate, can be onboarded with relative ease, and become accessible throughout the platform.
One’s DMP interface, showing how audiences can be created from 1st, 2nd and 3rd-party data
Demsey contrasted this approach with that of Google, which caught flak recently for preventing third-party data platforms from gathering data on the Google Display Network.
One is modular, so clients using its programmatic buying tools, for example, aren’t obligated to also use the DMP. Demsey said the AOL development team went to great lengths to ensure that clients would be able to plug their preferred vendors’ software into the One platform without significant loss of data or increase in turnaround time. He promised that AOL would not pressure any clients into using more of its tools, and in some cases, like independent measurement providers ComScore and Nielsen, AOL will actively encourage using third parties.
“It takes a lot to be open,” Demsey said. “It takes transparency in terms of what’s happening in the system, and pricing. It takes the ability for clients to ‘bring their own.’ It could be ‘bring your own data’ — that’s something a lot of platforms have today — but we think it’s going to evolve into BYOM, or ‘bring your own metric.’ This goes back to clients being the people who dictate what ROI is, what success is, across all their media channels.”
A big part of AOL’s open ecosystem philosophy is data portability, Demsey said. Often data platforms are “walled gardens,” which don’t provide the capabilities to easily transfer a client’s data outside of the environment. Some actively prohibit data exporting, meaning any data the advertiser collects on the platform has to stay there — a bit like a bank giving a customer the option to close their account, but not withdraw their savings first.
“Over the past year or so, in all my discussions with agency and brand leaders, owning their own data was seen as one of the most important characteristics of platform partners they were engaging with, and for many of them an outright requirement,” Demsey said. “They wanted to be able to use their data across any channel, with any partner, at any point in time. And they wanted to have the flexibility to effectively future proof their strategy against whatever new hot digital media property or technology is going to come down the pipe in the next few years. They didn’t want to have data locked in a place where it was inaccessible, or not exportable to a new ecosystem.”
Dentsu Aegis named Canadian launch partner
AOL has selected Amnet, the trading desk subsidiary of Dentsu Aegis, as its beta partner in Canada. Although all AOP and Adap.tv clients in Canada will have access to some new features, Amnet will be involved in testing the full range of One’s capabilities.
“With our clients approval and in partnering with the first fully open platform in Canada, we are able to leverage our existing data partners on one platform, solving real challenges that marketers face and ultimately simplifying a sometimes fragmented landscape,” said Hisham Ghostine, president of Amplifi Canada, the media investment arm of Dentsu Aegis.
AOL Canada general manager Joe Strolz said that the core problem One is attempting to solve for both technically-savvy marketers and agencies is complexity. With so much new technology, and such a fragmented ecosystem, marketers typically have two options to navigate the programmatic space. They can hand off the entire operation to a large company to deal with — an agency or a marketing services firm — but that means they’ll also give up control of their strategy and their data. Or they can try to build the expertise internally, by hiring and training staff, and working with a anywhere from 5 to 15 vendors to cobble together a solution.
The latter approach gives the marketer more direct control of their operation, and the flexibility to adopt the newest and best-in-breed solutions as they hit the market. But there’s a catch: “Apart from being difficult, the end result is suboptimal because you’ve got siloed insights, you have incompatible datasets across different partners, and you’re probably paying too much for it because everyone you’re working with is charging you a fee,” Strolz said.
The One platform is designed to unite the simplicity and seamlessness of option one with the control and flexibility of option two, he said. It gives marketers an all-on-one system that ties together all the capabilities they need in programmatic in a single-sign on, relatively simple interface, but with the extensibility to add new components as desired, and the ability to manage, export and own their data.
Although it’s too early to judge whether One succeeds in the lofty goals AOL has set for it, the company can certainly be credited for the completeness of its vision. It’s recognized that while some buyers are interested in having a streamlined, well-integrated system for media buying, but they don’t want to be locked into using a single vendor.
AOL has already invested heavily in programmatic, and so far it’s paid off. In the past year alone, its ad tech platforms revenues grew from 4% of non-search revenues to 39%. In Q1 2015, AOL reported 16% growth in programmatic sales year-over-year, increasing to $260 million globally. The success drove 8% growth in the company’s bottom line, despite declining display ad revenues.
In terms of market share, AOL has a very long way to go to catch up with Google, and it’s still trailing venture-funded ad tech startups like MediaMath and Turn. But what AOL does have is a very strong brand — unlike most programmatic companies, it’s mentioned in the same sentence as tech industry stalwarts like Microsoft and Yahoo. Even marketers who don’t know much about programmatic have heard of AOL, and by now many of them have been exposed to the powerful marketing machine AOL has built up to promote One. That could make all the difference.
