MediaContacts Partners With Adify On Custom Ad Networks

Media Contacts, the interactive media agency of Havas Digital, has named vertical ad network Adify as a preferred ad network for developing custom networks on behalf of clients. “We are streamlining our business to partner with the best and most strategic partners for our clients,” said Ed Montes, managing director, Havas Digital North America, in a statement. “We selected Adify Media as a preferred network because it delivers unmatched quality of audience and transparency.” Adify, a unit of Cox Enterprises, operates more than 200 niche networks, including those run by Six Apart, Pajama Media, the Travel Channel and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. It claims a total audience of more than 109 million and has a proprietary ad-targeting solution to select sites where certain users spend more than 25% of their time.

Read More: MediaPost

Why Are Legacy Ad Players Losing The DSP Race?

I was reading Zach Coelius’s article defining DSPs the other day and it made me wonder, why does it seem like new companies, generally, are winning the DSP wars?  For that matter, how did no one jump into the space now dominated by Pubmatic, Rubicon, and AdMeld?

• Zach says that DSPs should have access to billions of impressions per day.  Ad.com had that years ago.  Valueclick was big.  Right Media, theoretically, could have tried to spin around and be a DSP.  One wonders how they let so many new companies enter this gap.
• Zach emphasizes reporting, impression attribution and other features as key aspects of a DSP.  Traditional third-party ad servers are all perceived as excelling in this area.

Certainly, there are features that they did not have, but it seems like extending the product would be easier than building a new product.  I can point to several things that probably made transitioning to this new exchange/DSP world difficult…

Read More: CogMap.com

Our Digital Lives Have Evolved — So Must Trust

After reading that headline, I can see some (maybe lots) of you scratching your heads saying: “Wait a minute — trust is a not a technology!” A decade ago that would have been true — it is not now. Our digital lives were once confined to e-mail, some web surfing and an occasional online purchase (for the braver among us). A mere decade on and our lives are increasingly being lived online. Yet, while our dependence on the internet has grown exponentially, the technologies we use to navigate the sometimes dangerous, somewhat untrusted waters of the internet remain the same — largely confined to incremental improvements in narrowly defined segments of security or access. The unfortunate result is that the trust gap is more “gaping” than ever. On a personal level, it’s difficult to authenticate what we see online, who we interact with, who we label an “expert” and what information is trustworthy. If we want to buy something online, we may know that an SSL padlock shows us that our interaction is encrypted, but it speaks nothing about the trustworthiness of whom we are encrypting with. Social networks introduce business rules to ensure privacy, but these practices are easily breached.

Read More: AdAge