Yield Management Isn’t Just for Ad Operations Anymore

Tracking and managing ad inventory is as critical as it’s ever been for online publishers, but the concept of yield management has expanded beyond the ad operations group and today touches every part of a successful online media operation. It has become essential that all areas of a publishing organization have accurate and meaningful data points to make decisions to optimize ad inventory and maximize revenue. Let’s look at how effective yield management can benefit the various departments at an online publisher:

Ad Operations:

This is the nerve center for driving delivery for all those campaigns that the sales group has worked so hard to bring in. But just delivering isn’t enough. The ad operations team must have a clear vision of actual inventory on a real-time basis to ensure they don’t hold back too much inventory. This prevents under delivery, a practice that leaves money on the table for many publishers. Ad operations also has to manage their most valuable inventory and make sure premium impressions are monetized in the most effective manner. Having an effective yield management process allows ad operations to maximize the value of their inventory before it gets released to networks and exchanges or, even worse, goes unsold.

Read More: YieldEx

Yahoo! Begins Requiring Right Media Seats for Demand-Side Platform’s Advertisers

The other shoe appears to be falling.

If you’re a demand-side platform or ad network on Right Media Exchange, you may not be allowed to buy Yahoo! Class 2/remnant inventory on behalf of your client unless your advertiser gets its very own seat on RMX. (Having an advertiser get its own seat is not easy on RMX. It requires time, money – and approval.)

According to multiple, reliable sources, that’s the latest directive from Right Media account managers who began telling some of their DSP/network clients that they will have until December 2 to migrate their advertisers. Thereafter, the display ad inventory “valve” containing Yahoo! inventory which leads directly to the DSP, will be turned off.

As All Things D’s Peter Kafka reported two weeks ago, retargeters such as TellApart, Criteo and Dotomi have already had their “Class 2″ inventory (Yahoo! remnant display ads) shut off.  This week’s move isn’t a huge surprise given the demand-side platform model is essentially the same between retargeters, DSPs and ad networks.

Read More: AdExchanger

TidalTV Taps Korrelate For Offline Sales

Advertisers and publishers are still struggling to connect online marketing messages with offline sales, which could boost demand and prices for online ads. To this end, online video ad platform TidalTV is tapping Korrelate for sales attribution using its census-based O2O (online-to-offline) measurement service.

The O2O service, which so far is focused on automotive purchases, is based on non-identifying data received from third parties about the past behavior of a user’s Web browser, based on the Web pages visited.

This data is used to put group users into segments, which are then targeted with relevant advertising. It is combined with offline data to determine ad effectiveness. The offline consumption information is drawn from RL Polk’s household-level make and model purchase data from vehicle registrations.

This method is sensitive to privacy concerns, according to Korrelate, because it doesn’t require any identifying information about the viewer, and no offline data can be tied back to an individual online user.

Read More: MediaPost