Bronte Media

Online advertising is being driven more by sites improving their eCPM from 50 cents to $1 than P&G and the big auto companies deciding to reallocate large portions of their budgets. The latter makes for a good story in the media, the former a good quarter.

So I’d agree wholeheartedly with Pat McCarthy of Right Media when he says that more people will be talking about remnant inventory. Pat estimates that three quarters of inventory is remnant and a quarter is premium. On a dollar basis, it’s probably closer to 50/50. But if you go from 50 cents eCPM to a dollar in the next two years, and premium CPMs are relatively flat that would mean that remnant inventory would represent around 66% of the dollars, and so on.

People should be talking already. It is not as sexy to talk about tricking inducing 2 in 100 teens into a $10/mo ringtone affiliate offer via behavioral targeting but that’s more important right now than figuring out what % of online advertising should be relative to overall advertising.

Seriously, if I hear one more clown use the logic that the Internet accounts for 6% of advertising BUT 20-30% of media time THEREFORE online advertising will go up I will lob a tomato at them. Firstly, a huge chunk of Internet minutes are spent COMMUNICATING not ‘consuming media’. MySpace is communications not content. Yahoo mail and Hotmail are communications. AOL IM is communications. i.e. they all compete with cell phone/talking IRL. </end rant>

Back to remnant inventory. There are some interesting companies attacking the problem of what I call Wal-Mart Media: More efficiently showing low-value performance-based direct marketing offers across billions of impressions. But in the battle of the giants, Google has the mantra ingrained in its DNA far more than Yahoo and MSN (although with huge web mail properties, it’s not as if they haven’t had the chance in the last ten years).

You’ll know remnant media has made it when someone comes up with a more eloquent name for it.