Pre-Roll Is Catching Up with Display in Terms of Real-Time Advertising Inventory Available in the U.S.
As a real-time media buying platform for video advertising, TubeMogul processes a lot of data on ad spots available for bidding in a given day across both pre-roll and display inventory. In all, these marketplaces are bigger than the New York Stock Exchange in terms of daily transactions.
While it is widely known that display volume is large due to a glut in inventory, a less known fact is that pre-roll video advertising is steadily catching up. Aggregating across the major exchanges and sell-side platforms, from Doubleclick (which includes YouTube pre-roll) to spotXchange and beyond (see a full list of inventory partners here), and controlling for inventory pushed live due to new company partnerships, TubeMogul analyzed average growth in daily volume of ad spots available in the U.S. (inset).
In the past five months, pre-roll volume grew by an average of 34.9% per month, far outpacing display advertising’s 7.8% monthly growth rate. In November, we are seeing an average of over 200 million auctions per day.
Read More: TubeMogul
The Collision of Ad Exchanges and Sell-Side Platforms – Does it Matter?
We are in the midst of industry consolidation in online advertising. Companies are merging (MediaOcean), selling (MySpace, AdMeld, interclick), and buying (Tremor Video, Federated Media) as they adjust business models to meet market demands. Companies like ad exchanges, DSPs, ad networks and sell-side platforms (SSPs), continually innovate and add new offerings to create competitive advantages.
It’s inevitable that exchanges and SSPs collide, as they are essentially in the same space. I see it firsthand when my company, an exchange, is confused as an SSP competitor, even though we are actually a close partner and do business with the majority of SSPs.
Can publishers and advertisers manage this complex environment when both sets offer similar value propositions?
For publishers, they are inundated with choices to sell digital inventory. While looking to sell the most volume at the highest value to maximize yield, publishers also seek advertisers with similar brand values that are relevant to their audience. In sales, publishers want to monetize inventory through partners, while avoiding channel conflict and maintaining direct sales control.
Read More: MediaPost
Efficient Frontier Buys Leading Australian Digital Marketing Firm
Seeking Deals to Expand Product Offerings, Geographic Footprint
Efficient Frontier, one of the larger remaining independent digital marketing firms, is getting a little bigger. The company is buying one of the largest digital agencies in Australia, Downstream Marketing, for an undisclosed sum.
The deal gives Efficient Frontier immediate scale in Australia and the opportunity to expand in Asia as the company seeks to tap faster-growing international markets. Downstream Marketing’s clients include American Express, Avis, Vodafone and Weight Watchers. The 30-employee company is run by CEO Steve Knowles, former head of marketing for eBay in Australia.
It’s the second big deal in a year for Efficient Frontier, which acquired social-agency Context Optional in May for a reported $50 million.
Like a lot of foreign markets, digital ad spending is small but growing fast. Online advertising spending in Australia reached $2.45 billion in the 12 months ending June 30, 2011, up 20% from a year ago, and is on track to surpass $3 billion in 2012, according to the Australian Interactive Advertising Bureau. “Those aren’t small numbers and it’s another extension of our business,” said CEO David Karnstedt.
Like a lot of firms born in search, Efficient Frontier is attempting to expand beyond its original purpose into all areas of marketing where automated auctions are transforming media buying. Originally that was search and then display advertising, but has since expanded to ads on social networks such as Facebook, video and mobile.
Read More: AdAge
5 Ways to Reinvent the AOR for the Digital Age
I had a lively conversation over lunch last week with an agency head and his largest client. We were talking about digital media, connected consumers, and how they’re shaking up the advertising business as we’ve known it. We each saw things a bit differently, but we all agreed that the traditional ad agency business model is fatally broken and needs to change.
The client chided the agency head: “We need you to do more with less, especially when it comes to execution tasks like media planning and buying. I don’t want to pay by the head for monkey work.” Ouch. More generously, she said she valued the agency’s strategic message and program development work and hoped they could make better use of analytics to connect total client investment to results.
The agency head noted that the client’s procurement department had squeezed the AOR (agency of record) fees so tightly that it made it difficult for the agency to invest in innovation efforts – like analytics – that would enable it to become more strategic. “Procurement has drained the life blood out of agency-client relationships.” The client nodded sympathetically.
I had to chime in with, “Isn’t this why programmatic buying was invented?” I qualified my question by explaining that tech geeks like me are excited about the rise of ad exchanges, demand-side platforms (DSPs), real-time bidding (RTB), etc., but the reason these things are being adopted so quickly is that they solve a fundamental business problem for both the agency and the client. Using smart software to help do “monkey work” means – at least in theory – that the agency can reallocate staff and resources to focus on more strategic messaging and communication work that moves the brand forward.
Read More: ClickZ
Media6Degrees Becomes Ad Matchmaker Via RTB, Data
Media6Degrees will officially roll out a tool dubbed Planner next week that gives advertisers and publishers access to targeting data.
For advertisers, the report provides a list of the best publisher sites. For publishers, the report provides the same for advertisers. The tool relies on technology that creates matches based on data collected from Web page tags, or code, placed on advertisers’ and publishers’ Web sites. The data represents clusters of consumers with similar likes.
Calling the data that creates this “fingerprint” unique to a specific customer base, Andrew Pancer, COO at Media6Degrees, describes the code as a targeting pixel that gathers information. He believes the data can help publishers generate premium sales from real-time bidding insights, along with revenue generated from putting remnant into exchanges.
Publishers have been looking for ways to take advantage of RTB, but most don’t like the idea that inventory gets sold without the support of their direct sales force. These days it’s about adding “value” and “efficiencies” to inventory, which RTB allies suggest will bring to the process.
Read More: MediaPost
It’s 9 p.m. Do You Know Where Your Ads Are?
By George John
“Change is good.” So goes the tagline of arguably the first viral commercial – a Doritos ad featuring recently defeated governors Ann Richards of Texas and Mario Cuomo of New York talking about “change” as they munched Doritos from the newly changed and re-branded packaging.
Change has come to the $30 billion digital advertising industry. The “Mad Men” days are over (well, the suits and secretaries are gone, but you could argue drinking, ennui, and client resentment are still fixtures of Madison Avenue). In the old days, agencies used to place an ad in relatively few places. “Give me the back cover of Life magazine and a TV spot at the beginning of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” a media director could say, and then the agency and client could just buy the magazine and turn on the TV to see that the ad was correctly placed.
If you could teleport “Mad Men”’s media buyer Harry Crane directly from 1968 to 2011 and ask him to plan a campaign, he wouldn’t believe we now talk in terms like online ad networks, real-time bidding, inventory exchanges, data exchanges, and offline metrics studies.
Read More: Forbes
Yang eyes Yahoo buyout with private equity
(Reuters) – For the last few years, a widely circulated joke about Jerry Yang was that he had the best tan in Silicon Valley from all the time he spent on Stanford University’s golf course.
But the jests stopped about six months ago, when the Yahoo Inc co-founder and former CEO put away his golf clubs and began showing up on a daily basis at the Internet company’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, according to a high-ranking Yahoo executive.
Now, Yang is interested in a deal with private equity firms that would take the $20 billion company off public markets, according to people familiar with the situation.
Such a deal would involve rolling over Yang’s stake in Yahoo, which stood at 3.63 percent as of April 2. Yahoo’s other co-founder, David Filo, would likely follow Yang’s lead and roll over his stake, said other sources close to Yahoo. Filo held 5.90 percent of Yahoo’s shares as of May 11.
Shortly after firing Carol Bartz as CEO in September, Yahoo and its longtime advisers at Allen & Co and Goldman Sachs began working on a strategic review, which could include a sale of the Internet pioneer, after receiving unsolicited expressions of interest.
Read More: Reuters
