The game-changing truth is that the publishers who take the left fork, toward the land of skimpy data and low-level audience and advertiser analytics, will slide to the bottom tier of performers or out of business altogether.

Important Details: Baseball legend and tantalizingly mangled quotes machine Yogi Berra gets credit for saying, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it." Now publishers face that fork in the road regarding their use of analytics. Tom Chavez, founder and CEO of Rapt Inc. and, following the acquisition of Rapt by Microsoft, General Manager of Microsoft Advertising's Online Publisher Business Group, has written a must-read analysis of this analytics fork in the road. This extract sketches out the map:

"These days data seems to be on the lips of every player, principal, enabler, provider, intermediary, and hustler in digital media. There's no question that the decoupling of media from data is a dislocation that creates opportunity or disaster for publishers.... With the emergence of DSP's [demand-side platforms], the buy-side of digital media has, almost overnight, armed itself with increasingly sophisticated tooling for segmentation, real-time bidding, and ROI analytics. Publishers, meanwhile, are left with dated platforms architected to manage ads, not data."

"Existing publisher systems simply don't scale to accommodate the avalanche of audience data from sources such as

• online interaction with content;
• user registration databases;
• profile and behavioral third-party sources;
• offline providers.

and generated from devices such as:

• PCs;
• mobile handhelds;
• tablets;
• set top boxes;
• game devices."

Chavez also links to another excellent analysis of the publisher's analytics data fork-in-the-road dilemma, this one by Jordan Edmiston Group's Tollman Geffs in his IAB presentation, "Are Publishers &@%$#ed?". Bizo's Russ Glass' predicts "the rise of the publisher as the key cardholder, creating a much more equitable environment. The publisher is well-positioned to take the driver's seat for a few simple reasons," which he lays out in his well-argued "The Rise of the Publisher: Harness Rightful Ad Value." Scout Analytics' Matt Shanahan regularly sees through the FUD and misinformation around the publisher's analytics opportunity-challenge in his concise blog posts.

Implications: Chavez, Geffs, Glass and Shanahan provide publishers with rare clarity and deep insights in these pieces that are "must read" and "must share" across publishers' executive staffs - Editor-in-Chief, chief revenue officer, head of Sales, CIO, head of strategy and CMO. These pieces have, in turn, triggered equally valuable comments.

Jason Kelly, Vice President, Digital Strategy & Revenue Management at Time Inc Digital joins Chavez's discussion saying: "To extend your comments a bit:

1. If you can't measure it you can't manage it
2. If you can't manage it you can't monetize it
3. Those that can manage it (Networks, Exchanges, DSPs, Etc.) will monetize it for and around you leaving you behind.

While I don't think anyone can claim to have all the answers yet, a problem well-framed is a problem half-solved."

And Jonathan Mendez, CEO and founder of Yieldbot, always way out ahead of the field (see Insights 11 June 2010, Avoid These At Your Peril: 3 Beacons in the Fog), commented on Chavez's analysis, "Bravo! This is a Manifesto for Pubs and it's so spot on I'm getting suspicious that you stole our business plan."

But the reality is that these forward thinkers are far out in front of the majority of publishers. From our position working daily with publishers of all sizes and types, Chavez's claim that "these days data seems to be on the lips of every player, principal, enabler, provider" doesn't ring true regarding B2B trade publishers. Geffs, whose firm has many publishers as clients, says as much with his cheeky and provocative title, "Are Publishers &@%$#ed?" Glass and Shanahan offer components of promising solutions for the currently too small subset of B2B publishers convinced that they must jump off the fence and act now.

Brian Tomasette at Mobtown Labs is looking ahead, alert to the upcoming fork in the road, and sizing up the situation, and he writes: "Typically, most adservers dump logs into massive long-term storage databases using either Hadoop, Neteeza, or even Oracle to store this. There is definitely a maximum number of records you can insert per second, limitations on the structure of this data which could complicate how you pull it out later for reporting, and furthermore the more data you store in one place, the harder it is to pull out a tiny piece of it on a quick recall.

• 100 million impressions per day
• 300k clicks
• 20k page view events

Per day this creates data totalling 100,316,000 event records, 4,179,833 events per hour, 69,663 per minute or 1,161 per second. Then you have to think about how that number will spike during certain hours of the day and then lets say you definitely want to design the system to handle a lot of advertisers so let's say 1,000 advertisers....you are talking about being able to handle between 1 million and 20 million events inserted into the database per second. So how do you do this while managing costs? And is it even doable?" But then we hear some B2B trade publishers who question whether diving into the parallel universe of the audience-advertiser-data provider melee is even relevant to them, seeing it as a tar-baby that only consumer publishers or e-commerce firms need to tackle.

In Outsell's 2010 fifth annual advertising and marketing study, 73% of B2B advertisers identified "difficulty in evaluating the effectiveness of their advertising and marketing" as a major drawback and problems in buying advertising, while 72% identified "difficulty and expense of receiving good metrics," the #1 and #2 ranked problems they face. Our Analytics-Wired Content and Demand Media studies have also dug into how analytics adds revenue by steering content to what matters to both readers and advertisers.

B2B trade publishers WILL come to this analytics fork in the road and they WILL have to take it, by action or by default. The game-changing truth is that the ones who take the left fork, toward the land of skimpy data and low-level audience and advertiser analytics, will slide to the bottom tier of performers or out of business altogether. The others, who take the right fork toward immersion following the path that Chavez, Geffs, Glass, Mendez and Shanahan chart out so clearly, will be the winners in re-capturing fair value for their content and advertising. That leaves a sorry third group: those lost causes who don't even know that this fork in the road is just around the next corner.

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