The Trade off: Quantity vs. Quality with Ad Vendors

Would you pay the full price of a luxury sports car like a Lamborghini if you knew it had a Ford Escort engine?Obviously not. Before you spend that kind of money you would look under the hood and take it for a test drive.The same is true for ad vendors, platforms and their new technologies.Like everywhere else, they're basically playing two different games: quantity versus quality.Some of them will give you reach and exposure for the quantity and compete in a game of price. Cost Per Million, CPM, and a race to zero.Others will deliver higher-quality ad viewers through ever-improving targeting capabilities. Here we're willing to pay more for the viewer because it takes less viewers to achieve our goal, For example, qualified conversions.At my company last week we made an 11th hour decision to pull a client campaign hours before launch because we found out that we were paying for quality and being given quantity.With today's trend toward local and hyper-local digital marketing, their technology would take the precision of an ad viewer's latitude and longitude and dumb it down to a ZIP Code in order to determine the closest location of our client.In a situation where more than 30% of our client's locations share the same ZIP Code, that usually results in the viewer being driven to a location that is not the closest one to them.We specialize in multi-location digital marketing at PowerChord and that's not a good user experience and definitely not worth paying a premium.You've taken the Holy Grail of digital marketing, the precise location of the viewer and dumbed it down to an imprecise use of their ZIP Code as their location.I'm not willing to pay a premium for imprecision. Nor should you.

So remember to look under the hood and take it for a test drive before you invest too much money in your precious new ad solution.