The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.

Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”

People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.

Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.

Read More: NYTimes.com

Integrated DR Marketing for Multi-Channel Retailers

Since the launch of AdWords in 2000, Google has worked with advertisers and their agencies to increase brand and product awareness — and to drive sales — by helping advertisers reach the right person, in the right place, at the right time, through the effective use of search advertising. The success of this tactic has generally been measured by connecting search advertising campaigns to revenue within the e-commerce domain.

As consumers have become accustomed to a multi-channel world, however, it has become important to look outside the “e-commerce box” to measure search campaign success. The goal in doing so is to find the correlation between search advertising and overall company sales, both online and offline, as customers are present in both places.

In recent times, a growing number of our customers have asked us and their agencies how they should approach the concept of quantifying online’s impact on in-store sales. We recently thought through the concept with Razorfish and came up with a joint POV; you can find that on the Razorfish site, here.

Read More: GoogleRetail.Blogspot.com

When marketers buy television spots, they can turn on the tube and watch them run. Magazines and newspapers? Marketers can flip to their ads. But when it comes to online inventory, the questions still linger: Are my ads truly running where and when I want them to? Am I wasting impressions and ad dollars serving ads in front of the wrong audience, or are they subject to impression fraud? Are they running next to content that might be offensive to my audience or on the same page as one of my major competitors? Most of us may have chuckled over humorous examples of the wrong ad in the wrong place, but it isn’t that funny if it’s happened to you.

Most advertisers are already sold on the value of good online marketing and understand how leveraging the digital world for their end goals is an important part of their marketing mix. So why are we seeing consumer media time online rise to almost 40 percent but online budgets still only represent a portion of that ratio?

When asked why the big dollars aren’t yet flowing like they could into the channel, most decision makers seem to have an issue with trust — whether it be in brand safety concerns, unproven measurement, etc. Ultimately, the currency of choice is trust, and for some marketers, especially ones rooted in deep, traditional advertising familiarity, the online world is still a bit of a mystery. In the same vein, can you imagine if you went to buy a thousand shares of Apple and instead were given a thousand shares of a worthless penny stock? Would you continue to patronize a restaurant where you weren’t guaranteed to get the meal you ordered? Even hardcore digital advocates admit that there are still questions — and a few bugs left to exterminate –within virtual inventory.

Read More: iMediaConnection

Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media 

Digital media agency, FRWD, hosted digital event Pushing Boundaries: Exploring the Evolving World of Display Media yesterday at the Fine Line Music Café in Minneapolis. Industry leading publishers, demand side platforms, data aggregators, verification and survey tool providers gathered to help each other prepare for, and profit from, the fast-changing world of online advertising.  MediaMath, Simpli.fi, BlueKai, DataXu, Lucid Media, ADSDAQ Exchange, [x+1], and Rocket Fuel; among others exchanged ideas on the direction of the industry during 4 panels and 2 keynote presentations.

The transfer of data integration into ad exchanges and DSPs coupled with technology and real-time bidding (RTB) capabilities are increasing at a rapid rate, almost as rapidly as the industry is changing. Joe Zawadzki of MediaMath predicted that the industry transformation from “Mad Men to Math Men” will occur by 2012 at which point “Don Draper will be replaced by your high school Dungeon Master.” 

Panel speakers throughout the afternoon explained the details of successful ad exchanges and DSPs, specifically the capabilities of combining data and audience research targeting with the need to assure brand protection, transparency, and the unique market dynamics of RTB.  

Read More: FRWDCO.com

Google and the Search for the Future

To some, Google has been looking a bit sallow lately. The stock is down. Where once everything seemed to go the company’s way, along came Apple’s iPhone, launching a new wave of Web growth on a platform that largely bypassed the browser and Google’s search box. The “app” revolution was going to spell an end to Google’s dominance of Web advertising.

But that’s all so six-months-ago. When a group of Journal editors sat down with Eric Schmidt on a recent Friday, Google’s CEO sounded nothing like a man whose company was facing a midlife crisis, let alone intimations of mortality.

For one thing, just a couple days earlier, Google had publicly estimated that 200,000 Android smartphones were being activated daily by cell carriers on behalf of customers. That’s a doubling in just three months. Since the beginning of the year, Android phones have been outselling iPhones by an increasing clip and seem destined soon to outstrip Apple in global market share.

True, Apple sells its phones for luscious margins, while Google gives away Android to handset makers for free. But not to worry, says Mr. Schmidt: “You get a billion people doing something, there’s lots of ways to make money. Absolutely, trust me. We’ll get lots of money for it.”

“In general in technology,” he says, “if you own a platform that’s valuable, you can monetize it.” Example: Google is obliged to share with Apple search revenue generated by iPhone users. On Android, Google gets to keep 100%. That difference alone, says Mr. Schmidt, is more than enough to foot the bill for Android’s continued development.

And coming soon is Chrome OS, which Google hopes will do in tablets and netbooks what Android is doing in smartphones, i.e., give Google a commanding share of the future and leave, in this case, Microsoft in the dust.

Can it all be so easy? Google’s stock price has fallen nearly $150 since the beginning of the year. Financial pundits have started to ask skeptical questions, wondering why it doesn’t give more of its ample cash back to shareholders in the form of buybacks and dividends. Some suspect that all that temptation merely encourages Mr. Schmidt, along with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page—the triumvirate running the company—to splurge on gimmicky ideas that never pay off. Fortune magazine recently called Google a “cash cow” and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.

But to hear Mr. Schmidt tell it, the real challenge is one not yet on most investors’ minds: how to preserve Google’s franchise in Web advertising, the source of almost all its profits, when “search” is outmoded.

The day is coming when the Google search box—and the activity known as Googling—no longer will be at the center of our online lives. Then what? “We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges. “I mean that in a positive way. We’re still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.”

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

Says Mr. Schmidt, a generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn’t know you wanted to know. “The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating—that serendipity—can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically,” Mr. Schmidt says.

Mr. Schmidt obviously has an eye to his audience, which this day consists of folks with an abiding devotion to the newspaper business. He speaks in sorrowful tones about the “economic disaster that is the American newspaper.” He assures us that in the coming deluge trusted “brands” will be more important than ever. Just as quickly, though, he adds that whether the winners will be new brands or existing brands remains to be seen. On one thing, however, Google is willing to bet: “The only way the problem [of insufficient revenue for news gathering] is going to be solved is by increasing monetization, and the only way I know of to increase monetization is through targeted ads. That’s our business.”

Mr. Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he’s a believer in targeted everything: “The power of individual targeting—the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

That’s a bit scary when you think about it. But for investors and executives the big question, of course, is which companies will control these opportunities. Google may see itself as friend and helper to the media business, but it also clearly sees itself in control of the targeting information. Says Mr. Schmidt: “As you go from the search box [to the next phase of Google], you really want to go from syntax to semantics, from what you typed to what you meant. And that’s basically the role of [Artificial Intelligence]. I think we will be the world leader in that for a long time.”

Between here and there, though, the company faces ever-growing legal, political and regulatory obstacles. The net neutrality debate, which Google has led, has taken a sudden turn that has many of its former allies in the “public interest” sector shouting “treason.”

What was most striking about the set of net neut “principles” Google produced this week with former antagonist Verizon was that they didn’t apply to wireless. “The issues of wireless versus wireline gets very messy,” Mr. Schmidt told one news site. “And that’s really an FCC issue, not a Google issue.”

Wait. Isn’t the future of the Internet wireless these days? Isn’t wireless the very basis of the new partnership between Google and Verizon, built on promoting Google’s Android software? But Google has now broken ranks with its allies and dared to speak about the sheer impracticality of net neutrality on mobile networks where demand is likely to outstrip capacity for the foreseeable future.

If that weren’t about to become a sticky political wicket for the company, it also faces growing antitrust, privacy and patent scrutiny, fanned by a growing phalanx of Beltway opponents, the latest being Larry Ellison and Oracle. “There’s a set of people who are intrinsic oppositionists to everything Google does,” Mr. Schmidt acknowledges resignedly. “The first opponent will be Microsoft.”

Mr. Schmidt is familiar with the game—as chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems in the 1990s, he was a chief fomenter of the antitrust assault on Bill Gates & Co. Now that the tables are turned, he says, Google will persevere and prevail by doing what he says Microsoft failed to do—make sure its every move is “good for consumers” and “fair” to competitors.

Uh huh. Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy.”

Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn’t stickiness—even slightly extortionate stickiness—what these Google services aim for?

Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.

Not that Google is a doubter of the value of social media. Mr. Schmidt awards Facebook his highest accolade, calling it a “company of consequence.” And though “there is a lot of hot air, a lot of venture money” in the sector right now, he predicts that one or two more “companies of consequence” will be born among the horde of new players just coming to life now.

A skeptic might wonder whether, despite present glory, Google itself might yet prove a flash in the pan. The company has enormous technological confidence. Mr. Schmidt describes how YouTube, its video-serving site, almost “took down” the company in its early days, thanks to the swelling outflow of video dispatched from its servers to users around the globe. Salvation was the “proxy cache”—lots of local servers around the world holding the most popular videos. “The technology that Google invented allows us to put those things very close to you,” says Mr. Schmidt. “It was a tremendous technological achievement.”

But with YouTube, as with lots of Google projects, there remains the question of how to make money. Google captured the search wave and shows every sign of positioning itself successfully for the mobile wave. As for the waves after that, your guess may be as good as Mr. Schmidt’s.

Read More: WSJ.com (entire article here)

The banner ad is the Web’s original advertising format, but many have viewed it as a disappointment. Prices for display ads quickly tumbled, and marketers fell in love with targeted search options.  That’s not to say display units are on their way out. On the contrary, tens of millions of dollars in venture capital is flowing into ad technology. Investors are betting that a market the Interactive Advertising Bureau pegged at $8 billion in 2009 can quickly grow five times or more with the help of better machinery. (See also: “Display Ads Aim for a Banner Year.”)   “If you take the logic behind targeting to the extreme, it’s all about discovering hidden tier-one inventory,” said Terence Kawaja, managing director of GCA Savvian Advisors. “There’s a lot of inefficiency in inventory pricing.”  Inventory aggregator AdMeld is the latest company to benefit from this belief, closing a $15 million Series C round of funding that brings its backing to $30 million. Norwest Venture Partners led the round, which included AdMeld’s previous VCs as well as a strategic backing from Time Warner Investments.  AdMeld operates a tech platform that publishers use to maximize the amount of money they make from display ads. Publishers like Discovery, Fox News, Reuters and Pandora use its yield-optimization software to determine how best to package display ad inventory for audience-based buys.

Read More: AdWeek

Simplifying The Narrative

Josh Chasin of comScore can definitely count me among his fans.  He wrote a great article late last year on the limitations of CTR as a metric.  A couple weeks back he wrote another great one that I have been looking for a moment to comment on.  Between the upcoming product launch and the 1 year old I finally found a little time, somewhat belatedly.  As I read it, the main theme of Josh’s most recent article was that as an industry we have inhibited the migration of brand-focused budgets online with complex and conflicting narratives, which cause advertisers essentially to throw up their hands and look for reasons not to spend.  I couldn’t agree more.  In fact, I don’t think Josh would object to framing this as a different angle on the same idea I discussed in a post last year (Josh – feel free to comment if I am taking your name in vain).  Regardless of the angle we each take on the story, we’re clearly in violent agreement that the narrative needs to be simpler.  Josh is also quite correct that the 30-spot is an extremely compelling creative format, next to which a hastily-assembled static banner can look, well, flat.  However, as I have previously noted, within 5 years about 80% of households will have the capability to fast forward through that compelling creative.  Online creative formats get more compelling every year – it’s not hard to imagine a well-made pre-roll, rich media or even animated flash creative execution comparing favorably to a TV ad that is watched at 10X normal speed with no sound.  Even before DVRs reach their inevitable tipping point, the research shows that online advertising drives sales at least as well as TV.

Read More: Brand.net

The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets

Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty’s computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.  The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn.   The code knows that her favorite movies include “The Princess Bride,” “50 First Dates” and “10 Things I Hate About You.” It knows she enjoys the “Sex and the City” series. It knows she browses entertainment news and likes to take quizzes.  “Well, I like to think I have some mystery left to me, but apparently not!” Ms. Hayes-Beaty said when told what that snippet of code reveals about her. “The profile is eerily correct.”  Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a “beacon” to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person’s name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of “50 First Dates”).  “We can segment it all the way down to one person,” says Eric Porres, Lotame’s chief marketing officer.

One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.  The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. 

• The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.

• Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.

• These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.  In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.  The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges.  “It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”  The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer.  As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles.

But over two-thirds—2,224—were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.  The top venue for such technology, the Journal found, was IAC/InterActive Corp.’s Dictionary.com. A visit to the online dictionary site resulted in 234 files or programs being downloaded onto the Journal’s test computer, 223 of which were from companies that track Web users.  The information that companies gather is anonymous, in the sense that Internet users are identified by a number assigned to their computer, not by a specific person’s name. Lotame, for instance, says it doesn’t know the name of users such as Ms. Hayes-Beaty—only their behavior and attributes, identified by code number. People who don’t want to be tracked can remove themselves from Lotame’s system.  And the industry says the data are used harmlessly. David Moore, chairman of 24/7 RealMedia Inc., an ad network owned by WPP PLC, says tracking gives Internet users better advertising.  “When an ad is targeted properly, it ceases to be an ad, it becomes important information,” he says.  Tracking isn’t new. But the technology is growing so powerful and ubiquitous that even some of America’s biggest sites say they were unaware, until informed by the Journal, that they were installing intrusive files on visitors’ computers.

The Journal found that Microsoft Corp.’s popular Web portal, MSN.com, planted a tracking file packed with data: It had a prediction of a surfer’s age, ZIP Code and gender, plus a code containing estimates of income, marital status, presence of children and home ownership, according to the tracking company that created the file, Targus Information Corp.  Both Targus and Microsoft said they didn’t know how the file got onto MSN.com, and added that the tool didn’t contain “personally identifiable” information.  Tracking is done by tiny files and programs known as “cookies,” “Flash cookies” and “beacons.” They are placed on a computer when a user visits a website. U.S. courts have ruled that it is legal to deploy the simplest type, cookies, just as someone using a telephone might allow a friend to listen in on a conversation. Courts haven’t ruled on the more complex trackers.  The most intrusive monitoring comes from what are known in the business as “third party” tracking files. They work like this: The first time a site is visited, it installs a tracking file, which assigns the computer a unique ID number. Later, when the user visits another site affiliated with the same tracking company, it can take note of where that user was before, and where he is now. This way, over time the company can build a robust profile.

One such ecosystem is Yahoo Inc.’s ad network, which collects fees by placing targeted advertisements on websites. Yahoo’s network knows many things about recent high-school graduate Cate Reid. One is that she is a 13- to 18-year-old female interested in weight loss. Ms. Reid was able to determine this when a reporter showed her a little-known feature on Yahoo’s website, the Ad Interest Manager, that displays some of the information Yahoo had collected about her.  Yahoo’s take on Ms. Reid, who was 17 years old at the time, hit the mark: She was, in fact, worried that she may be 15 pounds too heavy for her 5-foot, 6-inch frame. She says she often does online research about weight loss.  “Every time I go on the Internet,” she says, she sees weight-loss ads. “I’m self-conscious about my weight,” says Ms. Reid, whose father asked that her hometown not be given. “I try not to think about it…. Then [the ads] make me start thinking about it.”  Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman says Yahoo doesn’t knowingly target weight-loss ads at people under 18, though it does target adults.  “It’s likely this user received an untargeted ad,” Ms. Allman says. It’s also possible Ms. Reid saw ads targeted at her by other tracking companies.  Information about people’s moment-to-moment thoughts and actions, as revealed by their online activity, can change hands quickly. Within seconds of visiting eBay.com or Expedia.com, information detailing a Web surfer’s activity there is likely to be auctioned on the data exchange run by BlueKai, the Seattle startup.

Each day, BlueKai sells 50 million pieces of information like this about specific individuals’ browsing habits, for as little as a tenth of a cent apiece. The auctions can happen instantly, as a website is visited.   Spokespeople for eBay Inc. and Expedia Inc. both say the profiles BlueKai sells are anonymous and the people aren’t identified as visitors of their sites. BlueKai says its own website gives consumers an easy way to see what it monitors about them.  Tracking files get onto websites, and downloaded to a computer, in several ways. Often, companies simply pay sites to distribute their tracking files.  But tracking companies sometimes hide their files within free software offered to websites, or hide them within other tracking files or ads. When this happens, websites aren’t always aware that they’re installing the files on visitors’ computers.  Often staffed by “quants,” or math gurus with expertise in quantitative analysis, some tracking companies use probability algorithms to try to pair what they know about a person’s online behavior with data from offline sources about household income, geography and education, among other things.  The goal is to make sophisticated assumptions in real time—plans for a summer vacation, the likelihood of repaying a loan—and sell those conclusions.  Some financial companies are starting to use this formula to show entirely different pages to visitors, based on assumptions about their income and education levels.  Life-insurance site AccuquoteLife.com, a unit of Byron Udell & Associates Inc., last month tested a system showing visitors it determined to be suburban, college-educated baby-boomers a default policy of $2 million to $3 million, says Accuquote executive Sean Cheyney. A rural, working-class senior citizen might see a default policy for $250,000, he says.  “We’re driving people down different lanes of the highway,” Mr. Cheyney says.  Consumer tracking is the foundation of an online advertising economy that racked up $23 billion in ad spending last year. Tracking activity is exploding. Researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute last fall found tracking technology on 80% of 1,000 popular sites, up from 40% of those sites in 2005.

The Journal found tracking files that collect sensitive health and financial data. On Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc.’s dictionary website Merriam-Webster.com, one tracking file from Healthline Networks Inc., an ad network, scans the page a user is viewing and targets ads related to what it sees there. So, for example, a person looking up depression-related words could see Healthline ads for depression treatments on that page—and on subsequent pages viewed on other sites.  Healthline says it doesn’t let advertisers track users around the Internet who have viewed sensitive topics such as HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, eating disorders and impotence. The company does let advertisers track people with bipolar disorder, overactive bladder and anxiety, according to its marketing materials.  Targeted ads can get personal. Last year, Julia Preston, a 32-year-old education-software designer in Austin, Texas, researched uterine disorders online. Soon after, she started noticing fertility ads on sites she visited. She now knows she doesn’t have a disorder, but still gets the ads.  It’s “unnerving,” she says.

Tracking became possible in 1994 when the tiny text files called cookies were introduced in an early browser, Netscape Navigator. Their purpose was user convenience: remembering contents of Web shopping carts.  Back then, online advertising barely existed. The first banner ad appeared the same year. When online ads got rolling during the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, advertisers were buying ads based on proximity to content—shoe ads on fashion sites.  The dot-com bust triggered a power shift in online advertising, away from websites and toward advertisers. Advertisers began paying for ads only if someone clicked on them. Sites and ad networks began using cookies aggressively in hopes of showing ads to people most likely to click on them, thus getting paid.  Targeted ads command a premium. Last year, the average cost of a targeted ad was $4.12 per thousand viewers, compared with $1.98 per thousand viewers for an untargeted ad, according to an ad-industry-sponsored study in March.  The Journal examined three kinds of tracking technology—basic cookies as well as more powerful “Flash cookies” and bits of software code called “beacons.” 

More than half of the sites examined by the Journal installed 23 or more “third party” cookies. Dictionary.com installed the most, placing 159 third-party cookies.  Cookies are typically used by tracking companies to build lists of pages visited from a specific computer. A newer type of technology, beacons, can watch even more activity.  Beacons, also known as “Web bugs” and “pixels,” are small pieces of software that run on a Web page. They can track what a user is doing on the page, including what is being typed or where the mouse is moving.  The majority of sites examined by the Journal placed at least seven beacons from outside companies. Dictionary.com had the most, 41, including several from companies that track health conditions and one that says it can target consumers by dozens of factors, including zip code and race.  Dictionary.com President Shravan Goli attributed the presence of so many tracking tools to the fact that the site was working with a large number of ad networks, each of which places its own cookies and beacons. After the Journal contacted the company, it cut the number of networks it uses and beefed up its privacy policy to more fully disclose its practices.  The widespread use of Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash software to play videos online offers another opportunity to track people. Flash cookies originally were meant to remember users’ preferences, such as volume settings for online videos.

But Flash cookies can also be used by data collectors to re-install regular cookies that a user has deleted. This can circumvent a user’s attempt to avoid being tracked online. Adobe condemns the practice.  Most sites examined by the Journal installed no Flash cookies. Comcast.net installed 55.  That finding surprised the company, which said it was unaware of them. Comcast Corp. subsequently determined that it had used a piece of free software from a company called Clearspring Technologies Inc. to display a slideshow of celebrity photos on Comcast.net. The Flash cookies were installed on Comcast’s site by that slideshow, according to Comcast.  Clearspring, based in McLean, Va., says the 55 Flash cookies were a mistake. The company says it no longer uses Flash cookies for tracking.

CEO Hooman Radfar says Clearspring provides software and services to websites at no charge. In exchange, Clearspring collects data on consumers. It plans eventually to sell the data it collects to advertisers, he says, so that site users can be shown “ads that don’t suck.” Comcast’s data won’t be used, Clearspring says.  Wittingly or not, people pay a price in reduced privacy for the information and services they receive online. Dictionary.com, the site with the most tracking files, is a case study.  The site’s annual revenue, about $9 million in 2009 according to an SEC filing, means the site is too small to support an extensive ad-sales team. So it needs to rely on the national ad-placing networks, whose business model is built on tracking.   Dictionary.com executives say the trade-off is fair for their users, who get free access to its dictionary and thesaurus service.  “Whether it’s one or 10 cookies, it doesn’t have any impact on the customer experience, and we disclose we do it,” says Dictionary.com spokesman Nicholas Graham. “So what’s the beef?”

The problem, say some industry veterans, is that so much consumer data is now up for sale, and there are no legal limits on how that data can be used.  Until recently, targeting consumers by health or financial status was considered off-limits by many large Internet ad companies. Now, some aim to take targeting to a new level by tapping online social networks.  Media6Degrees Inc., whose technology was found on three sites by the Journal, is pitching banks to use its data to size up consumers based on their social connections. The idea is that the creditworthy tend to hang out with the creditworthy, and deadbeats with deadbeats.  “There are applications of this technology that can be very powerful,” says Tom Phillips, CEO of Media6Degrees. “Who knows how far we’d take it?”

Read More: WSJ.com (Entire Article Here)

The minute that marketers use multiple media buying channels for advertising campaigns, they’re faced with an attribution conundrum. At a basic level, attribution is the analytics process of determining how effective each media buying channel is at producing the desired advertising outcome. It drives most of the campaign optimization decisions, such as budget allocation and tuning of campaign tactics.  At first blush, the challenge of attribution may seem solvable by simply assigning tags, specifying conversion events, and then letting ad servers report the performances on all the tags. But like most things in digital advertising, it’s not that easy, and in a media landscape of multiple media buying channels with real-time bidding strategies, many marketers are left wondering if their less-than-perfect attribution model is providing sub-optimal performance or even wrong decisions.  The current attribution model is the “last-ad wins” model. Basically, the last ad impression before the user conversion event gets 100 percent of the credit. Savvy marketers know that this instant gratification model oversimplifies the consumer decision process. Let’s pretend you see a great ad while watching the World Cup finals online. Chances are that you’re not going to rush to your online store to make the purchase right away. However, the next time you shop online or in stores, the influence of that brand is very likely at work. Attributing this type of delayed influences gives marketers visibility into what combination and sequence of ad messaging leads to conversions. It also provides the needed dials to optimize during dialogs with their consumers.

Read More: ClickZ

Twitter Sees Sizable Ad Business

Twitter is ready to declare success in its initial revenue-building efforts, and casts an even wider net by launching limited-time deals feed @earlybird, which provides time-sensitive offers from advertisers.  Disney has signed up for the first offer: a two-for-one ticket promotion for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which debuts in the U.S. today. The tweet takes users to a Fandango page to purchase the tickets with a discount code.  The @earlybird program is the latest addition to a growing set of revenue makers Twitter is trying. Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer, said it would continue to test concepts that can accelerate activity already happening on the service. Many companies, including deal-of-the-day services Groupon and Gilt Groupe, use Twitter to spread deals.  ”There’s going to be lots of iteration and testing,” he said. “So far it’s working.”  The company divides its business into two pillars: advertising and commercial services. Under advertising, Twitter is offering brands both Promoted Tweets, which appear in search results, and Promoted Trends, which are on its home page. @earlybird falls into the commercial sector, which includes business tools.  Coca-Cola reported that it saw 86 million impressions in a day and a 6 percent interaction rate for its Promoted Tweets campaign tied to the World Cup. Those results, Costolo said, are “not atypical” for ad campaigns on Twitter.  ”I’m confident the ad platform already works for big brands in terms of the reach and engagement we can provide,” he said.  The key for Twitter’s advertiser approach is finding activities happening on the service and amplifying them, Costolo said. @earlybird, for example, will exist as a regular tweet from Disney’s account. The @earlybird account, which already has 46,000 followers, will retweet the message. Similarly, advertisers can only run a Promoted Trend for something that is already showing momentum on the service. Old Spice, for instance, ran a Promoted Trend yesterday to hype its ad campaign featuring the actor in its “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” commercials sending videos to well wishers in social media.

Read More: AdWeek

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).

As an undergraduate marketing major at NYU, I took a class called Advertising and Media Planning. There was a question on one of the written tests in that class: “What are Gross Rating Points?” I answered, “Reach times average frequency.” For some unknown reason, my answer was marked incorrect – an event that apparently still scars me 30 years later, because this is the second time I’ve written about it here.  Every couple of months, I turn a corner and find myself smack dab in the middle of a debate about the efficacy of the GRP as an online metric. It usually goes like this. On the one side: “Advertisers need GRPs to place digital media in holistic media context.” On the other side: “Dude, whatever. GRPs are, like, totally last century. We can’t shoehorn the power of the Internet into an old metric.”  I’m going to try and get us all past this. GRPs are a necessary, but in no way sufficient, metric for evaluation of online advertising. If you’re in a hurry, you can stop reading now. If not…Gross Rating Points originated in broadcast media. First radio, and then television, had audiences measured at the program level: how many listeners or viewers were in the audience for a specific show? The result was a program rating. On January 19, 1953, for example, for the episode “Lucy Goes to the Hospital,” “I Love Lucy” garnered a 72 household rating — 72% of all TV households in the U.S. were tuned to the program (at least, according to Art Nielsen.)  Advertisers, of course, ran schedules, which were simply collections of spots. Each spot ran in a program, and so could be associated with that program’s audience rating. The GRP emerged as a way to express the audience to an aggregate of spots, which is to say a schedule, and its calculation couldn’t have been more simple: the sum of the program ratings for all the spots in the schedule. If an advertiser bought 10 spots across 10 different programs, and each program had a 7 rating, then the Gross Rating Points — the sum of the ratings of the spots in the schedule — would be 70. If an advertiser had run two spots in that landmark episode of “I Love Lucy,” they would have bought 144 GRPs (which would be parsed as a reach of 72, with a frequency of 2.)

Read More: blog.comScore.com

There Will Be 4,000 DSP’s

People used to say that there were 400 ad networks out there in their hey-day.  I think there will be an order of magnitude more DSPs.  Here is why: Building a DSP is easy. Ad networks were vertically integrated examples of our marketplace.  To build an ad network, you had to build an exchange, sign up publishers, and build a DSP.  The market has evolved to a point now where getting dramatic reach and scale at a level unimaginable 5 years ago just takes 10 lines of PHP (so that is like one line of Python?) with Right Media’s PHP library: Fearsome.  I used to tell people all the time that starting an ad network is the easiest thing someone can do: Get some inventory, call 20 agencies and tell them you have a new algorithm to drive performance, and they each give you a $20k test budget!  Voila, you did $400k in your first quarter.  Agencies felt pressure to find test budgets for everybody because, if a client were to ask them “What do you think of X”, you can’t say, “Well, we never tried X”.  Agencies felt an almost fiduciary responsibility to try new stuff.  Now, if you didn’t perform, the next chunk of dollars was tougher, but you had runway instantly.  We are seeing the exact same dynamic in DSPs today.  If you mix the data and inventory a little differently (and it would be hard not to), voila, you are worthy of a test.  Agencies are playing the field today, the great rollup of DSPs that everyone is so looking forward to has not yet happened, and agencies expect to and are prepared to try lots of different things.  All you have to do is perform after that and you have a business.  If you eat your margins early on, offer layered in retargeting, etc., the odds that you can artificially inflate performance in a way that makes your business look interesting is high and this gives you more runway to work.  Convert 25% of your test budgets to $200k renewals and you have a Q2 business doing $1m in revenue.  Building a DSP is cake.  Locking in data or inventory or building an algorithm that creates great performance for advertisers over time by arbitraging data and inventory is what will separate the winners from the losers, but it will be non-obvious in the first 6 months of working together who those guys are for agencies.  Remember when Glam spent millions of dollars of VC money buying inventory at a loss to lock in exclusive access to inventory, then when they had the advertiser base, they crushed payouts to pubs? There are a lot of the same kinds of problems that get slathered over early on in this market. Building a DSP that can look at 10 billion impressions a day vs. 1 billion cost-efficiently is interesting, but no one will need that scale for a year, so no one will know who can do it better/faster/cheaper.

Read More: cogmap.com

News Websites Discuss Life Without Google

The Web 2.0 Expo kicked off in San Francisco on Tuesday with a discussion that would be unthinkable without social media: How Web publishers can be successful without Google. The panel, moderated by the Journal’s Jessica Vascellaro, noted that many news websites today are addicted to Google’s search engine, which in many cases is their single-largest driver of traffic.  Yet the traffic they get from social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter is growing much more quickly these days. For example, newspaper and magazine publisher Hearst is seeing traffic from social media sites grow at a 250% annual rate, said Heidi Perry of Share This, a company that integrates sharing capability into thousands of big and small publishers, including Hearst. Moreover, traffic from Google tends to take a U-turn, said Tristan Harris from Apture, a company that helps sites figure out how to hold onto traffic once they get it. Some 30% of top news sites’ traffic comes from Google and about 30% of it goes quickly right back to Google, he said. “What good is all of this investment you make in driving traffic to your site from Google if it goes right back to Google?” he asked.

Read More: blogs.wsj.com

Adap.tv, creators of OneSource, a platform to help publishers better monetize their online video content, on Wednesday is expected to announce the addition of a real-time bidding interface to the adap.tv marketplace. The company considers RTB to be a key technology in a new breed of online advertising tools, which are increasing ad effectiveness for advertisers and driving higher revenue for publishers.  “One of the challenges facing online video advertising has been that publishers and buyers haven’t been able to reap the rewards of sophisticated targeting and bidding tools,” said Teg Grenager, founder and VP of Product at Adap.tv. “By offering RTB, the adap.tv marketplace is providing the missing link.”  For online video publishers, the addition of RTB to the marketplace is expected to provides access to a new channel of buyers, campaigns, and revenue, while maintaining control over the sale and pricing of their valued inventory.  Using Adap.tv OneSource, online publishers can extend the functionality of display management systems such as DART and Atlas.  The Adap.tv OneSource video ad-serving solution has no setup fees or integration costs. For publishers that want to sell and manage their own video ads, this may represent a considerable amount of savings over installing a dedicated video ad server.

Read More: MediaPost

Taking The High Road on Attribution Modeling

A year or two ago you started to see a lot of buzz in the marketplace about attribution modeling and analytics.  Atlas and Doubleclick started coming out with products they called “Engagement Mapping” and agencies and marketers dug in!  Finally someone would try to crack the nut of the age old question by John Wannamker:

“I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half. ”

So what ever happened with this? You really don’t hear too much talk about Engagement Mapping anymore.  Everything is more about “Audiences on Demand” or “Reatlime Bidding” or owning your own data warehouse and retargeting audiences.  Is this because people did the Engagement Mapping and figured out their attribution model and found the ‘half’ that is not a waste and is trying to buy that at the cheapest rate possible?  I don’t think so.  What I think happened is that we started to dig into the Engagement Mapping  and Attribution model tools and first of all realized warehousing all of that data and keeping it and analyzing it over the long term proved to incredibly expensive, incredibly cumbersome to compute and quickly access and the Engagement Mapping product could not be easily productized and made into a nimble nicely packaged tool where marketers and agencies could quickly make changes and show results, they bagged it and went for the next best thing.

Read More: MobTownLabs

Boucher Readies Privacy Guidelines More Strict Than Self-Regulatory Standards

More than one year after announcing plans to introduce new privacy legislation, Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) intends on Tuesday to unveil a draft of a new proposal to regulate online behavioral targeting.  Speaking at a meeting of the American Business Media on Monday, Boucher reportedly said the draft bill would require Web publishers, advertisers and other companies that collect data about people to notify them about the practice and obtain their consent.  The proposal also reportedly would require that publishers that collect data in order to serve ads on their own sites allow consumers to opt out of the targeting. Ad networks that track users across a variety of sites would have to obtain users’ opt-in consent, unless the networks allow people to access and revise their profiles. (Some companies that serve targeted ads, like Google, Yahoo and BlueKai, already have this feature.)  Boucher has previously said that the bill also would include provisions requiring mobile phone users’ consent before their location is shared.

Read More: MediaPost

Marketers that are eager to reach the perfect consumer track campaign budgets carefully, but ultimately want to have the ability to connect online and offline activity. Rocket Fuel is working on technology that will allow marketers to attribute online clicks to offline sales, Richard Frankel, Rocket Fuel president, tells MediaPost.  Advertisers offer a variety of ways to approach the problem of attributing clicks, research or ad views to the sale of an item. Some have tied codes on printable or mobile coupons to the in-store sale.  Frankel points to another approach: find a source that has sales data and build a bridge from that data to clicks on display ads the company supports.  “It mostly deals with cookies and IP data,” Frankel says. “There are a few companies that have this type of data, but they haven’t figured out how to work with companies like ours to make it actionable.”  That’s one problem that Rocket Fuel needs to tackle to make it work. Another is making it easy for advertisers to use the tools. And that’s not a simple task, Frankel says, because many companies that own the data don’t know how to support data projects on the Web.  The road map should put the tools in the hands of advertisers and marketers some time by June. Theoretically, the tools also could help advertisers understand that different types of media campaigns have real sales impact.

Read More: MediaPost

Watch Video From the AppNexus Summit

The AppNexus Summit focused on the evolution of ad networks and aggregators in the new world of real-time advertising. We moved beyond the hype and brought together a diverse group of speakers to share ideas and perspectives on what’s really working in online advertising. It was a fantastic day, and here are some highlights:

•   A keynote fireside chat with Aaron Easterly, General Manager of Network Strategy & Monetization at Microsoft, Johnathan Hsu, CEO of 24/7 Real Media, and Brian O’Kelley, CEO of AppNexus.
• A panel discussion on the business challenges facing ad networks with executives from AOL Advertising.com, interCLICK, Traffic Marketplace, XTEND, AudienceScience, TidalTV. Watch the video: What Works for Ad Networks: Business Challenges 
• We examined the technology issues and innovations in our industry with leaders from Chitika, Dapper, Rocket Fuel, Peer39 and eXelate. Watch the video: What Works for Ad Networks: Technology Challenges 
• John Ebbert from AdExchanger.com led a conversation on ad exhanges and inventory aggregators with perspectives from Pubmatic, AdMeld, The Rubicon Project, OpenX and Time Inc. Digital. Watch the video: The Role of Ad Exchanges, Publishers & Inventory Aggregators.

Read More: AppNexus.com

Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead

The Grateful Dead Archive, scheduled to open soon at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will be a mecca for academics of all stripes: from ethno­musicologists to philosophers, sociologists to historians. But the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists, who are discovering that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created “customer value,” promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning.

Read More: TheAtlantic.com

For years, Web media planners have lived in fear of The Screenshot. That’s the e-mailed evidence from a client that shows its ads running where they shouldn’t, such as a pornographic Web site. More brand advertisers than ever are turning to the Web and they are now seeking to solve this problem by engaging verification tools and services to alert them when their ads run on sites they deem unacceptable. Misplaced ads aren’t a problem unique to the Internet, but the digital medium makes the problem even more acute. A client and agency can easily pick up a magazine and see their ad ran as agreed to on the insertion order. Yet the Web is incredibly fragmented, with attention spread across millions of sites. That’s led to an automated system of ad placement that is far from transparent, with many ad networks not even showing clients where their ads ran.  “There’s more opacity in the system than there’s ever been before,” said Joe Mele, managing director of media and marketing at Razorfish. “There’s less visibility into what’s going on. For some clients, that’s just not OK.”  Service providers in the ad-verification space, including DoubleVerify, AdSafe and AdXpose, use tracking pixels and human analysis to identify misplaced ads and give advertisers the ability to get them taken down — not to mention refunds from publishers and networks.

Read More:  AdWeek

Attribution or Media Mix Models for Search Marketing?

I’ve never been a big fan of attribution models and have always preferred econometric models that do their best to generate a practical media mix model.  I’ve explained my reasons in different ways to clients, prospects, and show attendees, but I doubt I’ve communicated them as clearly as Avinash Kaushik did recently in his SES NY keynote. Kaushik pointed out the lunacy of some of the attribution models being used by search marketers who think of themselves as fairly advanced. Also, I’ve always been a fan of monitoring bounce rates of landing pages as closely as one monitors eventual conversion to leads or sales.  One of Kaushik’s now-famous pearls of wisdom regarding bounce rates is fully self-explanatory and never grows old: “I came, I puked, I left.” Clearly, for most of us looking at any analytics program, it’s boggling how high bounce rates can be, even for our most relevant and best-performing pages. Getting the bounce rate below 50 percent is doable, but it takes a lot of landing page tuning, copy testing, and layout adjustment.  If you take one thing from Kaushik’s crusade for better user experiences, it should be “watch your bounce rate.” While not everyone is capable of designing media mix and marginal attribution models, everyone has the ability to start improving bounce rates now.

Read More: ClickZ

The Display Market in 2010 – Revolution or Anarchy?

In the eleven years I have worked in and covered the display advertising market, I have never seen such a frenzy as I do today. In the past week, I  learned of three more DSP’s, two data companies and an attribution vendor.  Agencies are also in the game this time around. So what is causing this pile-on of new ad technologies to the market? There are a few things:

- Leveled playing field on the exchanges: The ad exchanges allow for innovation in ad optimization and bidding. Additionally, small companies can suddently compete for inventory that used to be locked up by ad network contracts.

- Better technologies: Cookieless tracking, container tags, real time bidding, data targeting and dynamic ad generation are all innovations that are hitting the hocky stick curve right about…now.

- Opening purse strings: We know that display advertising spending was essentially flat from 2008 to 2009. It appears that 2010 will show improvement. Marketers are getting budgets back and are ready to spend them.

- Desperate publishers: Publishers are grasping to find ways to make more money on their sites, so they are handing over the reigns to sell side platforms to help them optimize.

Read More: Blogs.Forrester.com

With the inauguration of its ad model, Twitter has made its first direct overture to the thousands of companies – big and small – that use it to converse with customers and build awareness. The resulting ad product, “Promoted Tweets,” is both more and less than advertisers might have hoped. More, in that Twitter has promised targeted ads will eventually appear directly in users’ Twitter streams and on third party clients. And less, in that the program will begin modestly, showing up only in search results – where CEO Dick Costolo confessed Twitter’s volume of page impressions is tiny. “It’s a very small piece of the overall traffic,” COO Dick Costolo said yesterday at the AdAge Digital Conference. Additionally, Twitter is still vague on many of the platform’s crucial components – such as how pricing and targeting will work. But in his comments Costolo unleashed enough details to set agency execs’ mouths watering – and in some cases scratching their heads – as they dashed off point-of-view statements to clients. Below is a summary of what’s known, and what’s not, about Twitter’s new ad platform:

Read More: ClickZ

Calculating The True Cost Per Acquisition

I had a conversation with a travel CMO excited at finally having cracked the code on her Display retargeting campaigns (prior to Google offering its own version of this link). Her cost per acquisition/booking (CPA) from this campaign was, let’s say, $18. And, let’s say she makes an average of $36 on each booking. So, great — she’s got it figured out, with a 100% return on ad spend (ROAS). Well, not exactly. While retargeting is a great tactic to get lost leads back to your site, what the vendors won’t tell you is that it’s greatly biased to overemphasize conversions if evaluated on a post-impression (a/k/a view-through) attribution model. Don’t get me wrong — I, for one, am a believer in the post-impression conversion. While Display ads have suffered from declining click-through rates since they debuted in the 1990s, consumers are still measurably affected by them and clearly respond to them to some degree. They may see that great deal to Cancun and go to your site on their own, and a great many consumers do this (there is even evidence that good Display drives search). So, clearly, I believe there is some effect that isn’t related to clicks.

Read More: MediaPost

Rubicon Unveils ‘Permission’ System, Shifts Display Market Control Back To Publishers

In a bid to help publishers regain control over the sale of their inventory through third-party ad networks and exchanges, the Rubicon Project this morning unveiled a new platform that it claims will “balance the digital advertising ecosystem.” The new platform, dubbed “Permission Control 2.0,” is an apparent move to give publishers tools for dealing with the shift toward so-called “demand-side” players who have shifted some of the online display marketplace power to ad agencies and media buyers. Rubicon described the system as a new “infrastructure” that will give publishers “complete visibility and control over which demand partners can sell their inventory, at what level of transparency and at what price.” In a related move, Rubicon said it is simultaneously launching a “real-time bidding” (RTB) beta program with a limited number of undisclosed publishers it claims will enable them to “safely capture all potential ad revenue, from all buying methods.” Rubicon did not disclose details about how the permission control system or the real-time bidding beta work, but said that combined, they would give publishers the ability to see and control “money spent through all industry buying methods – including real-time bidding (RTB), cookies, audience segments, content/contextual segments and site buys – without putting their pricing and direct sales efforts at risk.”

Read More: MediaPost