What’s the Real Deal with Real-Time Bidding?
Over the last year, the emergence of real-time biddable marketplaces for ad inventory has roiled the online media industry and revealed a potentially disruptive channel in the digital marketing landscape. As Mike Baker noted in a column on the topic, in fact, real-time biddable inventory has the potential to revolutionize the ad industry on the buy-side and sell-side alike. Those familiar with Clayton Christensen’s, “Innovator’s Dilemma,” will recognize both the threat and opportunity in this disruptive new technology. And agencies and marketers alike are retooling processes, teams, and states of mind to make sure they are not left behind. The forces reshaping the media landscape and bringing real-time bidding discussions to the forefront have little to do with “real time” anything. Currently, RTB inventory represents a small fraction of the overall media inventory traded daily across ad exchanges. The best estimates I’ve seen indicate 5 percent to 10 percent of biddable, exchange-traded media is purchased through real-time bidding today. But by all accounts exchange-traded media is working, and working well. At our agency, for example, we find exchange-traded media among our most efficient channels, often performing at comparable levels to search marketing from a direct response standpoint. So if “real-time” bidding isn’t driving this success, what is? The answer is clear: micro-segmentation and de-averaged pricing, neither of which need to be done in real time to be effective. (Here’s how de-averaged pricing works: Instead of paying a single price for one lump segment, you break the lump segment into its component parts and pay a unique price for each of those parts. This represents the “de-averaged” price.)
Read More: ClickZ
PointRoll Opens Insights To Connect Rich Media Engagement With Campaign Data
Rich media provider PointRoll on Wednesday is expected to unveil its Open Insights initiative, which aims to help marketers improve their creative campaigns. At launch, the initiative includes seventeen partners spanning audience understanding and identification, targeting, dynamic creative versioning, and reporting integrations. Open Insights works by connecting rich media engagement metrics with other campaign data to better understand the relationship between advertisers’ creative and media goals. Partners include AOL, QuadrantOne, Google Content Network, ContextWeb, and ADISN. Other real-time parameter integrations with Nielsen PRIZM and BlueKai have been put in place to increase dynamic ad generation and optimization in scale across publishers and ad networks. Of key importance, Open Insights offers a consolidated view of ad effectiveness across creative, targeting, media and delivery, according to said Max Mead, VP of business development and analytics for PointRoll. “Better data means better decisions,” said Mead. “We’ve heard from marketers that they’re looking for new ways to use data to understand and find new audiences, and to make sure they’re serving the most relevant, personalized creatives to different types of users.”
Read More: MediaPost
iPad Is The Google Killer
Forget the Kindle. The Kindle was dead as of 9 AM April 3rd, and had been on life support for the previous six months anyway as people put off buying a Kindle until the iPad came out. The iPad, however, is not the Kindle-killer. At least not anymore. The iPad is the Google killer. Now I see why Google is so focused on Android and Chrome. Now I see why Eric Schmidt left Apple’s board. Google is afraid for the first time, and it’s not Microsoft it’s worried about. I reached this epiphany this weekend as I spent some quality time with my new device. Here’s how it happened. I was sitting on my couch, getting to know my iPad. Of course, I wanted to check out some apps, to see if there were better or newer ones than the ones I had for my iPhone. I searched through the categories – entertainment, news, navigation, etc. – chose a number of apps, opened them, and played around. I read articles from the Wall Street Journal. Checked the weather reports on the blustery Seattle day we were having. And I looked at some recipes in the Epicurious app. I played some games. I downloaded a book and read a bit of it. I watched some YouTube videos. And then it dawned on me. I had just spent hours consuming content, connecting with brands I like, and discovering new and wonderful things to do with my iPad. And I never opened my browser. I didn’t need Google. I did all of these things and never touched the web. Never typed in search term. Never clicked www anything. I got a bit of a shiver. Then I bought more Apple stock. Here are some revelations that came to me this weekend:
- Apple has trained us to look for apps and use apps, not web sites. The iPad just furthers this behavior that Apple is training in us. I don’t need to open a browser anymore to get to my favorite content, my social networks, my maps and weather, etc.
- The disintermediation between Google/search and customers has been usurped (or soon will be) by Apple. Via apps, music, movies, and books, Apple now owns the customer “search” relationship.
- The app store is a discovery tool. Search is not. Search is a research tool because it assumes I already know what I am looking for, at least in part. This makes search useful for some things, but frustrating for others. As users discover this, they will use search less.
- All of this means that search will become less of a navigational tool over time. Today, search is often the first place people go on the web. In the future, that will become less necessary. You will start with your apps.
- Forget bringing your laptop on vacations anymore. You won’t need it. The iPad was made for planes and for consuming on the go.
- In fact, the PC will continue to exist, but solely as a productivity device. I think that Microsoft can actually breathe a sigh of relief because the iPad does not do away with the need for Office or Windows. It just makes the PC a more utilitarian device rather than the do-everything device it is today.
Read More: Mele’s Musings
