Death Of The Impression/Rise Of The Data Economy

Recently there has been buzz around the rise of advertising exchanges, which bring media inventory into a liquid, dynamic environment driven by automation and technology. The exchanges come in many flavors, but they all move in the direction of allowing wide swaths of media impressions to be bought in a computerized manner. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are all in the game, with ever-increasing amounts of inventory becoming available in this environment. In one sense this movement is a natural extension of the race to build the bigger and better network that can offer the one-stop shop to agencies and clients. Aggregate enough impressions, guarantee reach, sprinkle in some targeting solutions and you have a winner that can appeal to a wide range of clients. It is a simple enough model and an easy extension of the traditional media buy. But beneath the surface of this move is a far greater shift that will shake up and unsettle marketing as we know it.

Read More: MediaPost

David vs. Goliaths

While leviathans like Google and Apple battle for dominance of the mobile Web, Mobclix has adroitly maneuvered to build what is already a lucrative piece of the mobile-advertising landscape: a mobile-advertising exchange in which application developers can sell access to their audiences. The roughly 30-person company based in Palo Alto, California, which launched publicly about a year and a half ago, is on a $25 million to $30 million run rate and serving some 3.5 billion ad impressions per month, mostly to the iPhone and iPod Touch. “Every month, we’re essentially doubling,” said co-founder Krishna Subramanian. Mobclix is hiring eight people in engineering and business development, he said. It has 18 people in Palo Alto, five in San Francisco, and a fluctuating number in India.

Read More: Portfolio.com

Tap Into The Real Value Of The Consumer Data With Real-Time Bidding

Marketers understand that consumer data, both their own and that available from third-party vendors, is rich with potential to guide effective online advertising efforts. But the challenge is determining what type of data is right for your campaign or brand and whether it’s really delivering value. The good news is, with advanced capabilities of real-time bidding through a demand side platform, data can be better understood and put to work more effectively for display campaigns. Before getting into “how” to best test and learn about data tactics, let’s first review “what” types of data are available. While the industry is abuzz about so-called third-party data from specialized brokers, it’s worth emphasizing the primacy of a brand’s own data. Such first-party data is a by-product of online and offline marketing efforts, transactions, and CRM systems. Major sources of this data are ad servers, Web sites, and customer histories from back-end enterprise systems:

• Ad server: Site context, frequency, clicks, and view-throughs for ads served – the kind of data used to report on and optimize a campaign.
• Web site: Page visits, referral URL, offer type (e-mail, print ad, etc.), site engagement and conversions (downloads, purchases, registrations), etc. – the kind of data used for retargeting campaigns.
• Customer: Purchase habits and history, loyalty programs, and response to offers. Direct customer data is often used to define characteristics of desirable consumer segments to target.

Read More: ClickZ