Social Location Companies (Four)Square Off On Panel

Despite a pair of boxing gloves prominently displayed, a confab billed as the “Battle of the Mobile Social Media Leaders” turned out to be more lovefest than cage match. That’s not to say all the startups on the panel held at Ogilvy’s Digital Labs in New York on Friday will still be standing as independent companies a year from now.  The hot social location space carved out by companies on hand like Foursquare, Loopt and Brightkite is becoming more and more crowded as venture investors, entrepreneurs and big Web companies flood in to strike digital gold. But for an hour at least, the top players in the niche could bask in the warm glow of a sunny May afternoon and a buzzing overflow audience.  Seemingly, none of the rival companies gathered are even riven by jealousy over all the attention lavished on Foursquare, the undisputed publicity champ of the social location set. “More media raises the tide for all boats,” said Nihal Mehta, CEO and founder of social city guide Buzzd. “We’re all benefiting from the Foursquare press.”

Read More: MediaPost

Demystifying Real-Time Bidding

Real-time bidding (or as we like to call it, RTB) is major buzzword in the ad industry today. It hints of the term “Behavioral Targeting” back a couple of years ago, where anyone who wanted a play in this industry claimed to do it. However, unlike behavioral targeting, RTB is quite real and very effective. Problem is its poorly understood and complicated to build against. I’ve read a ton of articles dismissing this solution due to lack of clarity (and just sat in another meeting discussing the how-to while typing this blog). What I hope to accomplish is to shed some light on both the advantages and disadvantages of RTB so you can make up your own mind and see if it works for you.

First and foremost, what is it?
Simply stated, real-time bidding brings the ad buy down to the impression level.  Historically, when you buy through an exchange (ADX, RMX, name it) you create bids that are pseudo-static — every time you see an impression that fits the criteria you are looking for, you bid a set price. There are obviously subtle complexities to all of this but for simplicity lets assume that if bid 25-cents, you will always bid 25 cents. If you want to bid higher or lower, or on different targets, you change bid price and/or create more line items and targets and hope for the best. Thus, bidding in the standard exchange is like bidding for a crate of goods, hoping the crate contains the items you sort of asked for, and praying everything is in good condition. Real-time bidding is more like buying each product in the crate, at varying prices, and assembling yourself. In other words, you can inspect a wide variety of attributes about the impression and make a dynamic decision with respect to price. You can still do the bulk buy and hope for the best, but you have all the information you need to make a quantitative decision (something you cannot do on historical exchanges without creating thousands of line items).