Friday’s are for digging in the content vault; this article was first published in January of 2014 on iMedia by Eric Picard, VP of Strategic Partnerships, MediaMath and has been republished below.

People in emerging media spaces frequently ask me how they can get advertising into their content experiences or how they can use their technology to create value for advertising technology companies. Recently someone asked me about using bitcoin in advertising. In the past, I’ve spent hours working with clients who have hired me to help them figure out advertising models for their new emerging media products, despite my telling them early on that it’s unlikely that there’s a “there, there” related to their situation due to scale.

This is apparently hard for people to wrap their heads around, so let’s talk about this specific issue — the issue of scale in advertising. At its heart, the issue of scale is possibly the biggest and most fundamental issue in advertising — and it is frequently misunderstood. Here are my three rules of scale in advertising:

• Advertisers need to be able to spend relatively significant budgets efficiently at a low cost per impression.
• Advertising campaigns need to be able to reach relatively large audiences without significant complexity in managing them.
• Return on advertising spend (ROAS) needs to be able to be calculated in some form (including, in many cases, very simple key performance indicators).

Let’s talk first about the difference between marketing and advertising. I’ll give you my definitions, as the dictionaries don’t do justice to the concepts:

Marketing is about communication; it is a commercial message to a potential or existing customer, and increasingly it is a two-way conversation with potential or existing customers. Marketing includes one-on-one conversations between employees and prospects, mail and email communications, advertising, public relations, and more.

Advertising is about reaching the largest possible audience, with the best available message, as effectively, inexpensively, and efficiently as possible, generally through distribution over a large media channel. Advertising is a subset of marketing, but it has unique properties and rules that one needs to be aware of in order to apply it as a revenue source.

The most important concept that defines advertising as opposed to marketing is scale of reach at a reasonable cost. Advertising generally requires that a very large audience can be reached at a low cost per impression. Not only must the cost to reach the audience be relatively low, but the cost to manage the buying of the advertising media must also be relatively low. In addition, the ROAS must be somewhat measurable. That said, ROAS is a fairly squishy way of discussing a variable and varied set of metrics that are generally constructed on a per-advertiser — or even per-campaign — basis to gain an understanding of results.

At this point, a few of you are probably getting ready to argue with me about some of the things I just said. The likely argument revolves around some high-CPM inventory that is bought by some advertisers for some campaigns at a very high rate. And while this does happen, my points above still hold true. The cost of the inventory is relative based on the goals of the campaign and an analysis of its results.

For instance, some inventory that is highly targeted or highly effective can sell for a high CPM, but it can still meet the ROAS goals of the campaign. This can be due to high performance or a relatively rare target audience (perhaps extremely high income or very niche interests, such as pilots, airplane owners, or sky divers). It can also be due to a highly competitive media set (e.g., auto-intenders or people who manage investments).

ROAS is a superset of all the various means of calculating performance because ROAS can be based on brand metrics as well as performance metrics. It can be as laser-focused as a tightly bound formula including cost per acquisition (CPA) and the margin on the product that the “A” drove. Or it can be as broad as understanding that for every dollar of advertising spent (using some kind of analysis that could be sophisticated or simple) gross sales increased by some amount.

The ROAS calculations can also be derivative. For instance, there may be a very clearly understood metric that has very clearly understood value that can be used as the primary goal of a campaign. For instance, in the automotive space, the value of a test drive is very clearly understood; most car companies know exactly what the conversion rate is between test drives and purchases of their cars. It’s common to use test drives as a campaign goal, which is not really the goal of the advertiser, but it is fairly measurable and clearly understood in secondary value in sales.

For those trying to roll out a new (or emerging) advertising medium — one that is based on new content models, new distribution models, or new devices or technologies — this concept of scale is critical. Until a media type can provide enough reach to be of value, it’s hard to use advertising as a mechanism to fund it. That number varies based on the make-up of the audience using the media.

For instance, if a new hand-held device for hedge-fund managers were launching, the audience size needed to be ad supported would be much lower than a hand-held device for the homeless. For a mixed-audience scenario, one that’s by nature more affluent (since most emerging media scenarios tend to appeal to early adopters, who tend to be affluent), the magic number seems to be at least in the hundreds of thousands, but it can range into the millions.

The more information available about the audience that is adopting the emerging media, the more likely early ad funding is to occur. This audience data must be collected up front. The task cannot be left until later. If it is, there likely won’t be a “later.”