Recently, I have been chasing after the adverts of my son in law.
Although each of them has similar routines, similar actors, similar marriage contracts, similar slaps, almost vomiting blood, almost pretending to be pigs and tigers, and almost crooked mouths with evil smiles. But I still read it with gusto, and even out of curiosity, I downloaded a few novel apps to see the original work.
Sure enough, the original is the kind of parallel article that can write four kilograms a day.
It happened to be chatted with a friend who was advertising in an Internet company. I sighed and said: This kind of advertising is too hard. You really put a lot of thought on the materials when you do it.
He said that the ads that passers-by like you can get must be the best ones. Maybe the advertisers behind them took hundreds of ads and repeatedly eliminated them according to the effect, and finally left the most powerful ads. , Can be pushed to passerby users.
I asked again: Isn’t the production cost and delivery cost very high? He said, yeah, so a user can sell it very expensively. A user like you who has downloaded the App can probably sell for dozens of yuan.
Actually, I don’t know it myself, so I’m on the InternetIt is such an expensive existence. So, I learned from him again.
Today’s issue is to tell you from the perspective of Internet advertising, how advertising platforms can sell you high prices through technical means.
01
John Wanamaker, the father of the department store, asked a question: “I know that half of the investment in advertising is useless, but the problem is that I don’t know which half.”
This sentence is hailed as the Goldbach conjecture of the advertising industry.
Translation, these are the two major drawbacks of traditional advertising: advertising must be wasteful, and the effect cannot be measured.
When I don’t know how many sickles I need to cut a stubble of leeks, nor do I know how many catties of leeks can be cut with one sickle at a time. Then I will become the leek in the eyes of the sickle seller. Those who are cut are constantly being cut, and the cycle is endless. The traditional advertising company is the one that sells sickles.
In the issue of Ye Maozhong, we mentioned that the 4A advertising company has a perverted obsession with creativity, because the effect is difficult to judge, so it can only make full use of the creativity and try to occupy the audience’s mind.
As for the input-output ratio, don’t ask, ask is metaphysics.
The sickle of a capitalist is always particularly sharp when cutting the same kind. Relying on metaphysics, traditional advertising companies have made a lot of money in the pockets of major advertisers for more than 100 years, and have also created 4A’s creative retreat and exaggeration. But advertisers are miserable. They can’t stop advertising, but they spend tens of millions in advertising fees. The effect is blackened. The blackness in front of them is not black. It is all the area of their own psychological shadows.
It wasn’t until the advent of the Internet that advertisers really opened their eyes. Adults, the times have changed.
02
First, the platform must solve the problem of advertising waste. For example, SK3, a high-end skin care brand, wants to make a subway advertisement for itself. So they invested 2 million and bought a light board advertisement of about 100, with a one-month advertising cycle.
One month later, the boss found that the data effect was not obvious. Upon closer inspection, the marketing department put the advertisements on Zhangjiang Hi-Tech in Shanghai and Xierqi in Beijing.
These places are all Internet company parks, and the flow of people is large. The programmers are not interested in skin care products. If they know what oily skin is, they use a big treasure to wipe their face.
The 2 million yuan was lost, and the marketing director of SK3 was beaten up by the boss. Here we introduce the first knowledge point: audience orientation.
There is no one in the eyes of advertisers, only walking tags. Audience targeting is the process of tagging users.
As long as you add enough pre-attribute, then everything in the world is unique. In the eyes of ordinary people, a cow is a cow, but in the eyes of Chaoshan people, a cow is the sum of neck, spoon, spoon, five-flower tendon, three-flower tendon, fat corpus, hanging dragon and so on.
The same is true for capital. Users in the platform’s eyes are just the sum of a series of labels such as gender, age, income, geographic location, education, sexual orientation, hobbies, and health.
Some tags are provided by you yourself, such as age, hobbies, education, which are submitted during registration, and some are authorized by you to the platform, such as geographic location, which you can know when you open the positioning platform. There are also some, based on your user behavior, the platform will tag you.
For example, gender. Suppose you filled in male when you registered, but based on your click behavior, you found that you have recently clicked on bag lipstick, watched a short video of a handsome little brother, and also followed a yoga wear brand. Then according to your interests, The platform may determine that your cyber gender is female, and then push you an advertisement for SK3 skin care products.
I don’t want you to think you are a man. I want me to think you are a woman. Machine learning is such an overbearing president.
Then someone has to ask, what is the significance of the gender I submitted when registering? Of course, because most people will fill in their true gender when registering, then you can use the behavior data of these people to train the machine, and let the machine continuously enhance its judgment, so that it can more accurately judge who is the real girl and who is. The girl who has registered the male number, who is the big lady of women’s clothing.
Seeing this, you know that the marketing director of SK3 did not do a good job in targeting audiences from the beginning. The traffic labels of Xierqi and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech are mainly men, and the matching degree with high-end skin care products is too low, per capita. How about making a million a year? It’s not just wipe your face with Dabao every day.
ExceptStatic tags such as gender and age, as well as a dynamic tag, are used to determine the changing preferences of users. When you swipe Taobao or Douyin on your mobile phone, you will always find out what kind of products you have recently viewed and what videos you watched. Soon the platform will push you similar products and videos.
The process of surfing the Internet is a process of being tagged by the machine at any time. These dynamic tags have their own weights and will be updated and changed at any time. By calculating the weights of different tags, the machine can instantly recommend relevant advertisements and content to you.
It knows that you change your wives every three months, knowing that Juju’s life is short, and last week pushed Zhang Yuge of SNH48, this week he changed his heart to repost Song Xinran.
It knows who you are, where you are from, and where you are going better than you are. Every minute of your online surfing is secretly marked by capital.
03
Next, the platform must solve the problem of effectiveness. Here, we once again invite SK3, our major advertiser. This time, SK3 learned well this time and put ads on women more, Beijing Guomao, Dawang Road, Shanghai People’s Advertising, Xujiahui where shopping malls are more concentrated. They bought 100 billboards in one breath, which lasted one month to ensure that all people passing by during the month could see them.
As a result, the epidemic broke out and no one took the subway. SK3 once again lost 2 million in blood, and the marketing director was beaten up by the boss again. Why did it fail? Because traditional advertising advertisers buy the use time of a certain advertising space, the unit of settlement is time (CPT, Cost Per Time). In this period of time, the effect of exposure depends on the advertiser’s prediction.
In order to solve the problem of effect, the platform invented a brand-new settlement method. Here is the second point of knowledge today: the display volume contract. The display volume contract means that the contract signed by the advertiser and the platform is a headcount contract. I will pay you as much as you can traffic me. The unit is person-time. However, because the price of a single impression is too low, it is generally calculated based on a thousand visits (CPM, Cost Per Million).
If it becomes an impression contract, SK3 can tell the subway advertising sales: No matter how you put it, I will reach 50 million impressions in a month, that is, they must go before my advertisement Over. After calculating the subway advertising sales, the money is counted according to the head count, and it costs 10 yuan for a thousand people.
So two billboards, monitors and sensors were placed in the core transfer corridor of the subway station with the largest flow of people to calculate how many people passed by each day. As a result, the epidemic broke out accidentally and no one took the subway. The subway had to add 20 more billboards to SK3. Otherwise, the settlement time was up and the display volume was not enough, and the penalty was to be compensated.
As a result, with the efforts of both parties, the effectiveness of SK3 advertising has been guaranteed, and sales have also been good during the epidemic.
The marketing director of SK3 triumphantly reported to the boss. The boss was very satisfied. After thinking about it, he felt distressed that he had spent the wrong money last time, so he beat up the marketing director again: it would be better to do it earlier! I have a few 2 million that can make you such a waste! In order not to be beaten again, the next time SK3 was launched, the marketing director suddenly thought: Can I only show the ad to women?
Metro advertising sales are embarrassing: you can settle the bill only according to the female passengers passing by. It can be technically realized, but right, you have to add money.
Female passengers account for only half, and the price must be doubled. I’ll give you a 25% discount, 15 yuan for a thousand people. The marketing director agreed. So the subway advertising department added a gender recognition function to the monitoring system, only counting female passengers. The marketing department only spent 1.5 times the previous time and achieved twice the effect. The effect of the launch was outstanding. The marketing director went to the boss again to ask for credit. The boss was full of praise for the effect, but the money spent exceeded the market budget. The boss still beat the marketing director.
Students who are attentive may have discovered that if only the female passenger is settled, shouldn’t it be double the price? With a discount, won’t the subway advertising lose money?
Of course, this is not possible for subway advertising, but Internet advertising can.
The same algorithm, on mobile phones, SK3’s ads are only for female users, earning 1.5 times the money. The other half of the male users received computer advertisements specifically aimed at them, at 1.5 times the price. Equivalent to the same traffic, I sold 1.5 times the price.
Recently, I went to the cinema to watch “Interstellar” again. The verses of Dylan Thomas in the film are very suitable for ending this issue. Please remember, don’t gently walk into the good night constructed by capital and technology.
