Everybody’s a DSP, Wait, What’s a DSP?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve heard the term ‘DSP’ — “Demand Side Platform” thrown around like no other. The term has hit such a buzz that there is almost no meeting that doesn’t start with — “Wait, are you a DSP? What is a DSP? Is ____ a DSP? Are you working with a DSP? Which DSP should I work with?”. Let’s start with some history. I’m not quite sure who coined the term originally but it was primarily used to describe cross exchange buying desks & bid management solutions like Invite, Turn & DataXu. We at AppNexus even briefly described ourselves as a DSP — that was of course when the ‘Platform’ was still a part of DSP — more on that in a bit. Since then, agencies started allocating budgets away from “networks” and towards “DSPs”… Wait… what? You got it –agencies, eager to cut into the hefty margin networks take, started to allocate budgets towards DSPs for exchange buying. What’s of course ironic, is that the typical relationship between an agency and a DSP is certainly not a “platform” relationship but a simple media IO. Early versions of the platforms weren’t (and many still aren’t) mature and the only way they could make them work is by having people manually traffic and optimize campaigns on ad exchanges. Although the spirit of the relationship was one of a platform optimizing media across exchanges the reality is that it is primarily a service driven offering… something which practically looks very similar to a network with a slightly more defined box of inventory and in some cases clearer rules & margins.
Read More: MikeOnAds
Carol Bartz: Art, Science, Scale Will Revive Yahoo!
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz is speaking at the 4A’s ad agency confab this morning in San Francisco, and she’s her usual frank-speaking self. She’s using the occasion to answer people’s continuing questions about Yahoo’s vision and relevance–and she says the latter is something nobody should doubt. “You better friggin’ care,” she says. What sets Yahoo apart from the many other big Internet properties out there? Art, science, and scale–though she notes her marketing people didn’t like the algorithm duh, acronym that would make. (Everybody has data on the brain here.) Lots of targeting, work on measurement, etc. Targeting is a huge focus for Yahoo right now–as it is for every Web site and marketer alike. “We have so much data at our fingertips,” and Yahoo techies are working hard to turn that data into insights about consumers and targeting. On the the art side: “There really is a human side” to marketing. “It’s not all algo-driven,” she adds after mangling the word “algorithm,” while also avoiding a specific mention of Google and its algo-driven search engine and ad system. Next quarter, Yahoo will introduce Digital Adventures to work with agencies to be more creative on all media. Come up with off-the-wall ideas and test them.
Read More: RobHof.com
Collective Discusses AMP Platform’s New Engagement Metrics And Above-The-Fold Targeting
AdExchanger.com: Is the new attribution offering in response to your agency partners or are you being pro-active? Anecdotally from here, it seems that agencies are still predominantly reporting CTR as a key success metric.
This technology has been available exclusively on The Collective Network, so we know that advertisers value it. With regard the industry moving toward attribution measurement, the evolution has been gradual, but brand advertisers in particular are looking past CTR as the primary indicator or an advertisement’s success. Collective’s engagement metrics solution measures interactions (clicks, click-thrus, mouseovers), views, and average view time on all add units, including non-rich media standard units such as JPEGs and GIFs, for about a year. This new piece of software has been built so that it can integrate to both the AMP for Publishers sell-side and AMP for Advertisers demand-side analytics, targeting, and media buying systems. Built as a way to address the dying value of the rapidly disappearing clickthru rates – along with studies questioning the value of the clicker overall – the system was originally rolled out only to the Collective Network, which has been offering these metrics to advertisers for the last year. With more and more agencies looking for other metrics, the Collective Network saw a greater and greater desire for these metrics. After a year of battle-testing the system, Collective’s Technology Solutions group has now made these metrics available to its technology clients – both buy-side and sell-side networks – to integrate into their own offerings.
Read More: AdExchanger
