A friend of mine was recently written up in the NYT business section for some of the interesting work he’s doing on applying wall-street analytics to digital advertising. Darren Herman, president of Varick Media Management, is looking at advertising on the web much like financial traders look at investing money in untapped opportunities. It’s definitely a different way of looking at advertising. With all the data and analytics available from the web, agencies and technology companies have tremendous opportunity to use predictive modeling and algorithms to predict the success of various campaigns prior to launch and invest money in certain campaigns accordingly to maximize the return on that investment. In many ways, it’s no different than researching a specific stock to buy and then buying it and measuring it’s performance. If you do enough research and execute enough trades (i.e. media campaigns), you’ll hedge your bets and likely end up with some real winners and a solid return. Congrats Darren on the great press and keep up the innovation!
