Is A Demand-Side Platform The Future Of The Ad Network?
Demand Side Platforms (DSP) are hot! I can tell by the huge agency interest, and even more eager venture capitalists anxious to get in on the latest craze. Traditional ad networks and newfangled technology platforms are declaring themselves to be DSPs. Others who did much of the evangelical spadework for DSPs appear to be stung by the sudden rush. There is now an attempt to define a “true DSP”. At this stage, a “true DSP” as defined by a list of features serves little purpose and is as much a disservice to the industry, as it is disconnected from reality. In fact, many of the current DSP competitors—those with the most significant solutions already in-market—are successfully violating that definition of a “true DSP” to the benefit of their agencies partners. The truth is that a “fully self-service DSP” would be far too disruptive to most agencies at this early stage. There are far too many levers, knobs and buttons in a DSP robust enough to deliver the optimum cross-section of pacing, performance, and price for an agency to take on today. They range from mundane tasks like dealing with objectionable impressions and buys from non real-time sources to more arcane optimization tasks, RTB source integration, bidding strategies, discrepancy management, and post-campaign reconciliation.
Read More: AdExchanger
Watch The Videos From AdMeld’s Partner Forum
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VivaKi’s David Kenny On The Agency Challenge, Creative And Automation
AdExchanger.com: Everyone is talking about how agencies need to evolve media buying. Every major holding company has announced a media trading desk strategy. What areas of the workflow have not been addressed? What is the “not obvious” stuff?”
DK: When the industry talks about media trading, they generally talk about negotiating clout and leveraging investment strength to drive lower prices on inventory. The ability to do this is, of course, more important than ever given the economic crisis from which our clients are only just beginning to recover. But it’s really the price-of-entry. What we need to do more aggressively is leverage our scale to achieve advantages beyond price. For example, VivaKi faces the media owners and the networks to find new ways to add value to our agency brands and their clients. To aggregate data. To target people more accurately and effectively. We are building a smarter service model as an aggregator of scaled audiences that are identified for their passions, and we are building the pipelines like Audience on Demand that connect clients to those audiences in meaningful, relevant ways.
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Google Disses the Yield Optimizers
This morning, Google released information on how publishers maximize revenues using the DoubleClick Ad Exchange as well as other Google products. The post by Neal Mohan, VP of Product Management, on the Google blog includes a one sheeter. View the post here. And, download the one-sheeter here. There’s not much that’s new here except for an explanation on dynamic allocation. Interesting that the one-sheeter sticks it in the eye of “traditional ‘yield management.’” They put ‘yield management’ in quotes. Google is clearly positioning DART For Publishers (DFP) as the yield optimization solution of the future as its “dynamic allocation” allows publishers to set minimum floors with exchange buyers when managing between direct sold inventory, ad networks or buyer relationships managed through DFP. So, if you’re a publisher, you get to test the market for your impression, compare it with your other relationships and then sell wherever you want.
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comScore Releases 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review
comScore presents the 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review, its annual report on the prevailing digital trends of the past year and their implications for the future. The report looks across the digital landscape to highlight the industry’s leading stories of the year:
- Which consumer trends dominated the digital media scene in 2009?
- How did the economic environment effect e-commerce spending throughout the year?
- What is the state of the digital advertising market?
- How has the popularity of Hulu influenced the consumption of online video?
- How are market enablers such as unlimited data plans, 3G penetration and smartphone adoption driving mobile media usage?
Read More: comScore.com
AdSafe Media on Transparency Into Display Ad Inventory and the iFrame Challenge
AdExchanger.com: Given your observation of a decrease in non-transparent inventory in Q4, what is your sense of momentum for transparency into inventory? Is UGC becoming more or less transparent? Any other momentum stories you can discuss?
DH: We see inventory non-transparency (meaning the lack of real time, source level disclosure of the URL on which an ad is to be served) as a large and growing concern in the display markets, especially with the recent increase in “audience buying” via networks and exchanges. Lack of source level transparency is primarily an unfortunate side effect of inventory “daisy-chaining” (or inter-network reselling) that currently helps facilitate high inventory liquidity in the display marketplaces. As more advertisers begin using these platforms as a primary buying channel, it’s essential that we as an industry balance the positives of liquidity with the risks of not knowing where an ad is being placed. In short, liquidity is good because it equates to more efficient markets and greater inventory utilization; non-transparency is bad because it results in more brand safety risks to advertisers in the form of bad ad placements, and thus less dollars online.
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Who Owns The Data?
Audience targeting has come a long way, baby. In the last 5 years, we’ve evolved from simple intra-site and intra-network retargeting to advanced, algorithmically-driven audience targeting across the web with multi-variant data sources. Customized segmentation is available across an ever-growing list of data suppliers, and audiences can be analyzed & targeted based on buying history, content engagement, offline data sources, social media engagement, etc. It’s a Chinese-menu of demography, psychography, and implied attributes that is simultaneously exciting and dangerous.
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Mobclix Enhances Mobile Ad Targeting Through Partnerships
Mobclix, the largest mobile advertising exchange, announced a deal today with The Nielsen Company, the leading marketing and media information company, to integrate Nielsen PRIZM and Nielsen ConneXions segmentation systems into the Mobclix mobile ad exchange. By bringing traditional marketing techniques to mobile advertising through Mobclix Complete, ad network partners will now enable mobile advertisers to reach over 150 unique audience segments resulting in improved conversions over legacy mobile solutions. Mobile application developers and publishers will reap the benefits of 20-100 percent CPMs higher than the market. “With the increasing spend on mobile advertising, the need to have precise marketing within mobile marketing strategies has become critical for survival,” said Krishna Subramanian, Co-founder of Mobclix. “The enhanced precision enables advertisers and ad networks to produce greater advertising ROI and gives mobile publishers higher CPMs from premium ad buys. This dynamic will be highly attractive to advertisers and very effective for publishers with in-demand audiences such as the finance, utility and shopping categories.”
Read More: MarketWire
Plentiful Content, So Cheap
Last Wednesday, I met with an executive from Demand Media, a company that generates content based on popular Web searches and other data. Since then, I’ve spent about 20 hours reading past articles, calling people for background, doing interviews, writing my column, and working on the copy with editors Sunday afternoon. At Demand’s current pay rate, I’d be making almost a buck an hour. Never heard of Demand? You’ve probably seen its products. The company has five times more video on YouTube than any other single source and over one million original articles floating around the Web with an endless array of how-to and what-the-heck instructionals on everything from how to make your own bobblehead doll to bobbing for apples. According to the company, its YouTube videos are streamed 2.5 million times daily. And in those five days it took me to write this column, the company published 20,000 new articles or videos about losing weight, learning new tricks on a skateboard or tips for job hunting.
Read More: NYTimes
