Targeted: How Technology Is Revolutionizing Advertising and the Way Companies Reach Consumers
£3.60
Part history, part guidebook, part prediction for the future, Targeted tells the story of the companies, individuals, and innovations driving this revolution. It takes readers behind the scenes – examining the growth of digital advertising, its enormous potential, and the technologies that are changing the game forever. Leading the way is real-time bidding, which offers advertisers unprecedented precision in targeting ads and measuring their effectiveness.
From keyword micro-markets and ad serving systems to aggregated virtual audiences and new business models, Targeted is sweeping in scope and stripped of technical complexity. It is an essential resource for anyone interested in finding and connecting with customers in the vast and shifting Internet universe.
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Additional information
| Publisher | AMACOM (16 Dec. 2014) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 224 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0814434991 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0814434994 |
| Dimensions | 15.88 x 2.24 x 23.5 cm |
by Rob W
Lots of very general chat. Bought for a job interview but simply not specific enough.
by James Kyle
An interesting introduction to Target advertising on the internet.
by John Taysom
Admirably clearly written – pacey even. Very approachable: an interested observer of the on-line advertising and marketing industry will be very well briefed by the final page. But an advertising professional will find something new.
by Bobby Tables
Marketing to your target customers was perhaps a lot easier in the past, things were a little more defined, the pace slower, the territory more precise and the reach… Today with the Internet and always-on mobile technology, the world has became a little smaller, the potential market much larger and the range of marketing channels can be confusing.
A concise book such as this can be a digital lifesaver, giving you a mix of a historical overview about the “new” world of digital advertising, an overview of current offerings and an attempt to look into the future. The author has managed to cram a lot of great information into a little package, drawing on his own experiences as well as the thoughts of over four hundred interview subjects. There is no shortage of books that look at the “digital advertising” space yet this author has managed to produce something different that is neither one thing or another, yet it succeeds as a combination of everything. Whether you are an experienced digital marketer or someone who is about to dip their toe in the shark-invested waters, there will be something to take away from this very reasonably priced book.
Throughout the book are quite profound, blindingly obvious points that NEED to be reinforced as we are likely to overlook them. Such as: “The audience for digital content is enormous and global… it can be composed of the tiniest slivers of audience groups. Never has an audience of this aggregate size been this disaggregated. This is an audience that can consist, at times, of cohorts of one. Today, if a wealthy shopper somewhere on the Internet is in the market for an expensive luxury car right now, targeting that one shopper at that moment may be more valuable than advertising to millions of unmotivated consumers.”
Until you have read this book you might not appreciate just how comprehensive it is. Yet it flows freely like a cheap paperback novel, you whip through the text at a fair rate of knots whilst the information just flows into your brain. It is far from being an onerous read. Other books of this kind could well copy the author’s style (and no doubt the hard work of the publisher’s production department).
Don’t make the mistake of just glancing at the chapter titles as you might think it is a very dry, formulaic book (titles such as Search Engine Marketing, The Google Eclipse, Real-Time Bidding In Action, etc.). Browse and prepare to be engaged. Just don’t read the book late at night as you will find it hard to put down and your brain will be buzzing for hours afterwards when you should be safely in the arms of Morpheus.
by Robert Morris
Since the markets in ancient Athens and then Rome, merchants have struggled to create or establish demand for what they offer for sale or trade. That challenge hasn’t changed since then but the means and resources have certainly changed and none is more significant than the Web, devised by Tim Berners-Lee in 1993. Total retail sales in the US, for example, topped $4.53 trillion in 2013, and ecommerce accounted for a significant portion of that growth, up 16.9% in 2013–or nearly $40 billion–according to new figures from eMarketer. In 2014, the total is estimated to be 4.32 trillion, with ecommerce accounting for about 14.5% of it.
As Mike Smith explains, “My goal in this book is to explain clearly how powerfully enabling technologies such as paid-search advertising and real-time bidding work. In addition, I want you to take you behind the scenes to describe how some of the industry’s most brilliant innovators developed such technologies and created the novel business models of some of the outstanding companies that serve the future of digital ad sales.” That said, he adds, “the distinguishing factors in success are often management skill, flexibility, and the initiative that only leadership can elicit.” And I presume to add that in the healthiest organizations, leadership thrives at all levels and in all areas within the given enterprise.
Smith provides a lively and eloquent narrative during which he examines subjects and issues such as these:
o The nature and extent of the online ecosystem
o The major dos and don’ts of search engine marketing
o The potentialities and limitations of online auctions and paid-search advertising
o Google: From David to Goliath and then….
o The relationships between display advertising and ad networks
o Real-time bidding and/or online advertising: New paradigms?
o How and why real-time bidding works
o Lessons to be learned from Right Media and the building of its ad server
o The impact (thus far) of analytics on digital advertising
o Data collection and its impact (thus far) on privacy
Smith devotes the last chapter to the significance of new technologies (e.g. mobile telephony, tablets, and the adoption of apps that make use of HTML 5, as well as addressable TV). He suggests, for example, that there are five main reasons for the surge in mobile advertising (Page 160) and discusses what he characterizes as “the tablet tsunami” (161-166) before shifting his attention to the “changing landscape” (e.g. the increasingly greater pressure that mobile devices put on “the web-browsing model that has ruled for so long”), and the apparent (probable?) future of digital TV advertising.
Who will derive the greatest benefit from this book? Obviously, those who are primarily responsible for creating or increasing demand for (i.e. marketing) products and/or services. Also, decision-makers in agencies that are retained to help achieve that strategic objective. And also, those now preparing for a career in business or who have only recently embarked on one: they need to understand where the greatest (probable) needs are — or will be — so that they can formulate or revise their career plans.
When concluding his book, Mike Smith observes that “it has been the development of online ad technology, with its capacity for using data for great specificity in targeting and then optimization, that started the inexorable process that is disrupting TV advertising.” In fact, it is directly or indirectly disrupting every business that relies on a sufficient number of profitable customers to survive. For that reason, all business leaders need to read and then re-read this book or they will be insufficiently prepared to understand — and then take full advantage of — the disruptions now in progress as well as those that are certain to appear in months and years ahead.
by Thomas Matt O’Neill
Well researched and written in plain english, this is a fantastic book for anyone entering the online advertising world. Wheter you’re a CMO who came up through the traditional marketing and advertising ranks or a recent graduate who’s just entering the mad world of ad tech, investing a few hours in Targeted will be well worth your while.
It was eerie and at times unsettling reading a book where so many industry friends and colleagues are cited, interviewed, and quoted but it is also a testament to how well researched the book is. If the Kindle had never been invented, I’d expect to see this book in a lot of offices and on a lot of shelves over the next year or so.
It’s really the first-ever mass market book looking in detail at the multi-billion dollar online ad tech industry. A must read for those in the trenches and who would like to know what goes on in them.