Five Things Your DSP Can’t Do
Demand-side platforms (DSPs) are all the rage in online advertising today. Why? As buying and selling of online inventory moves from the relationship-driven, “three-martini-lunch” deal to a programmatic, impression-by-impression auction, advertising buyers are salivating at the opportunity to “cherry pick” the best inventory. So fire up your DSP contract, set your traders loose, and bask in the glory of online advertising victory! But hang on. The DSP promises of convenience and efficiency are certainly compelling. But the path to achieving real success in finding, engaging, converting and retaining your audiences and prospects online is much more complex than DSPs will admit.
Here are five functions a DSP cannot do for major advertisers…
Read More: MediaPost
Engagement Is Key For Rich Media Video Ads
When it comes to rich media ads on the Internet that employ video, engagement matters enormously. Environment, not so much.
That’s the major and in some ways surprising takeaway from a new study conducted by VideoEgg and comScore. The study examined the effectiveness of rich media video ads vs. traditional banners. The goal was to prove the theory that banner ads containing video are more engaging. In addition, the study gauged whether site environment — particularly contextual relevance — played a role in how well such ads performed. Overall, video ads proved to be more engaging — and engaging ads move the sales needle better than standard ads, the study found. (It was no surprise that VideoEgg’s AdFrame units — expandable placements that take over portions of Web pages — were roughly twice as effective as standard IAB banners at driving awareness.)
Read More: AdWeek
GroupM Will Be Watching Where Its Clients’ Ads Run, And Where They Should Not
In the biggest push yet by a major Madison Avenue player to gain some control over the sometimes capricious way that their ads run online, WPP’s GroupM unit has cut deals with two of the leading online ad verification services, and will integrate their systems as part of the tool chest that WPP’s agencies use to plan, buy and post their online display ads. The deals with AdSafe and DoubleVerify follow an intensive review of the major ad verification services, which included a month-long test involving half a billion impressions of online advertising inventory. “There’s always been the issue of are we getting what we asked for,” John Montgomery, COO of GroupM Interaction, one of the largest buyers of online media, tells Online Media Daily. “Just think of the staggering number of impressions we are delivered — there is no way of knowing that we are getting what we paid for.” Montgomery, who was part of the GroupM team that rewrote WPP’s terms and conditions of online advertising buys last year to gain more accountability for its clients’ ads and media buys, said the verification systems pick up where the T&Cs left off.
Read More: MediaPost
Yahoo! Starts Pilot Program With ‘Demand-Side’ Platforms
Yahoo Monday announced a new pilot program in which it is working with a group of “demand-side” ad exchanges and networks to develop best practices for audience-buying. Demand-side platforms involved in the program include Invite Media, Mediamath, Data Xu, Turn and X+1. Agencies have increasingly turned to these ad systems to wrest more control of the ad-buying process from traditional online ad networks and keep more revenue for themselves as well. “The pilot will demonstrate how Yahoo, in partnership with these industry leaders, can provide marketers with access to the audiences they most want to reach by leveraging insights from buyers, sellers and third-party data providers,” wrote Ramsey McGrory, vice president, North American Marketplaces, and Seth Dallaire, vice president, mid market sales, on Yahoo’s Advertising Blog.
Read More: MediaPost
Yahoo’s Bradford Leaves To Join Demand Media
Yahoo! Inc.’s Joanne Bradford, a senior vice president who oversees North American revenue and market development, is leaving to join online-content provider Demand Media Inc. Bradford will be chief revenue officer at Demand Media, the Santa Monica, California-based company said today in a statement posted on its Web site. Yahoo said Bradford will work with her team over the next few weeks to ensure a smooth transition. Yahoo, owner of the second-most-used Internet search engine in the U.S., is losing Bradford amid a turnaround effort under Chief Executive Officer Carol Bartz, who joined the company last year. During a presentation to analysts in October, Bartz praised Bradford for doing a “really, really fine job.” Bradford joined Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo in 2008, after working at online-ad agency Spot Runner Inc. and earlier at Microsoft Corp. Closely held Demand Media, which develops content for social Web sites on topics such as fitness, travel and comedy, was founded in 2006 with backing from Oak Investment Partners, Spectrum Equity Investors and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Yahoo rose 14 cents to $16.46 at 4 p.m. New York time on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The shares have fallen 1.9 percent this year.
Read More: BusinessWeek
Google: The Future Of Display Advertising
It’s been two years since we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick, a leading provider of display advertising technology. This is the first in a series of posts over the next few weeks about our vision for online display advertising in the years ahead. Today, Susan Wojcicki previews the series and looks back at how we’ve brought Google and DoubleClick technologies together over the past two years. -ed.
The first online display advertisement — a simple, clickable image — appeared online over 16 years ago. Fast forward to 2010. You’re likely to see display ads — image, text, video and rich-media formats — on most of the websites that you visit. These ads are crucial to the Internet. They provide information about thousands of products, services and businesses. They help to fund the web content and services that we all use. And they enable large and small advertisers to reach new customers, increase sales and grow their businesses. I’ve watched display advertising evolve from a series of simple, static images, to the incredible creative units that we see today. The best display ads today are often like mini-websites with complex animations, stunning graphics or videos, interactive and social elements. As technology enables better ways of matching ads, they’re becoming more relevant to the audience that views them and the website that hosts them. In addition, they’re bought and sold across the web more seamlessly than ever before.
Read More: GoogleBlog.Blogspot.com
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal
IT looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Three years ago, Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, jogged onto a San Francisco stage to shake hands with Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, to help him unveil a transformational wonder gadget — the iPhone — before throngs of journalists and adoring fans at the annual MacWorld Expo. Google and Apple had worked together to bring Google’s search and mapping services to the iPhone, the executives told the audience, and Mr. Schmidt joked that the collaboration was so close that the two men should simply merge their companies and call them “AppleGoo.” “Steve, my congratulations to you,” Mr. Schmidt told his corporate ally. “This product is going to be hot.” Mr. Jobs acknowledged the compliment with an ear-to-ear smile. Today, such warmth is in short supply. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Schmidt and their companies are now engaged in a gritty battle royale over the future and shape of mobile computing and cellphones, with implications that are reverberating across the digital landscape. In the last six months, Apple and Google have jousted over acquisitions, patents, directors, advisers and iPhone applications. Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt have taken shots at each other’s companies in the media and in private exchanges with employees.
Read More: NYTimes
Optimization Overdose
Demand side platforms (DSPs) are a giant leap forward for Adkind. They put the power back in the hands of the marketer to decide how much to pay for each audience segment, target them in real time, and hyper-optimize the campaign with the help of ingenious black boxes with Einstein-quality math equations inside. Dynamic ads are the other superheros. They empower marketers to tailor their message or offers based on performance (among other factors). More math equations that put more dollars into marketers’ pockets! Put them together and you get super-hyper-mega-optimized performance, right? Wrong! You get a mess. Here’s why: The DSP is optimizing against a specific creative. Let’s call it Big-Box Retailer Creative X. As the DSP sees a gradient of performance across different audiences shown Creative X, it optimizes your media buy to bid for more of those audiences. This scenario works great. Dynamic ads complicate this scenario in that Creative X is undefined. Put simply, the execution of the creative is determined by optimization performed behind the scenes, and whether that means showing pictures of a DVD player or a washing machine is determined each time the ad loads.
Read More: MediaPost
Hiring Freeze Starts To Thaw As Agency Business Hunts For Talent
After a nearly yearlong hiring freeze and having shed 14,000 employees, WPP chief Martin Sorrell had a bit of good news last week: The holding company is staffing up. It’s a welcomed announcement for an industry that lost almost 200,000 jobs between December 2008 and January 2010. Firms from Edelman to OMD to BBH are adding to their ranks, crediting a stronger business outlook and a need to add people with new skills. “Agencies had to respond to what was going on in 2009 by making some massive cuts,” said Pat Mastandrea, founding partner-CEO of the Cheyenne Group. She said when the market started to turn around in the fourth quarter of 2009 and budgets started to grow back, you had agencies that were too lean. “Now those agencies are in the process of having to address that by recruitment. And it’s even stronger in the first quarter of 2010 than it was in the last quarter of 2009.”
Read More: AdAge
Who Are The Online Publishing Companies That Matter
The ten largest online publishers own a disproportionate amount of the world’s web traffic. These busy sites, including subsidiary holdings, account for billions of unique visitors per month. They also comprise the most sought-after ad space in the world. However – and while the recession has played a role in the decline of the display CPM major publishers could acquire – an average $10 CPM, has in many cases, dwindled to $1CPM. For many publishers, display has simply not paid off. Search advertising revenues, however, have steadily increased during this same time. And, with roughly 90% of the major publishers’ revenue being derived from low-paying (and in many cases remnant) advertising networks, many would argue that it is just a matter of time before many of these sites begin charging users to access content; either on a subscription, or pay-as-you-go basis. The alternative, of course, requires an alternative approach to advertising — the fact of the matter is that publishers are not in the business of providing free content if they are unable to monetize their traffic.
Read More: Permuto.com
