Creating Value for Digital Planners!

My place of employment arms us with a bunch resources so we can do our jobs better.  Great tools.  EXPENSIVE tools.  Of course, we cannot have everything our little data-hungry hearts desire.  We have not found the one catch-all tool for all things digital display or sponsored search media.  In fact, there isn't one tool that comes close!  This is a source of much frustration for many of us.

As you know, I love working in digital media for many reasons.  It's fun, and in my opinion, it's the  future (and present!) of communications, entertainment, advertising.  It's also fun because of all the measurement.

Internet data companies have been providing value in sort of an "I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine" sort of way for a while, but lately I feel the value for planner specifically is really gaining momentum.

Take Adsdaq Agency Trading Desk, for example.  It works with your third party ad server to help you report on your existing campaigns contextually.  This is a free service.  What do they get from it?  They hope to illustrate the benefits of contextual targeting!

Traffiq is a service that is hoping to automate the planning, buying, negotiating, and reporting process for digital buyers. My only initial hesitation is that it would give preference to their partners, but I definitely think it's worth a shot to test it!

Quantcast has been helpful in getting site information for a while, but they continue to improve upon their offerings by letting marketers search for lookalikes across the web!

There are many more featured in this recent Clickz article.  Here's hoping we continue to see an increase in FREE research tools for for marketers!