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
5 Things You Should Know About the Future of Retargeting
Display advertising is changing rapidly and getting more and more confusing. And many people are looking to understand its landscape.
Here are five things you need to know that you may not have thought of when it comes to display:
1. There will be fewer ads per page. One of the problems with online advertising today is that there is no barrier to creating new inventory. Constructing a billboard alongside a highway costs capital. There are a limited number of :30 spots you can run during a top-rated TV show. But if you’re a publisher that wants to create new revenue, it is much easier to add more ads to a page than it is to get more users to the site, or to get the ads to perform better. I estimate that there is about five times more supply than there is CPM/CPC demand. The rest of the inventory is spent on CPA offers or site promotions. Smart publishers should be focused on their audience and properly pricing those ads, to make for a more efficient marketplace – rather than flooding the exchanges and networks with new inventory. As the market gets more mature, the market will get closer to a balance between supply and demand.
2. RTB will be the primary way to retarget and your DSP technology will be the difference between success and failure. For some, this goes without saying. Only a demand-side platform (DSP) accessing all of the major ad exchanges can provide enough reach to power retargeting at scale, particularly when there are any kinds of restraints, like targeting by geo. A good DSP is like a racecar or precision surgical tools – it allows the buyer using the DSP to distinguish between good inventory and bad, cheap and expensive, and premium and remnant.
Read More: ClickZ
Limelight Networks Announces Its Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile to Enable Publishers to More Effectively Create and Manage Mobile Web Presence
Service Allows for Tailoring of Content-Rich Web Sites — Ensuring Content is Displayed as it Should be, Regardless of Device
TEMPE, Ariz., Nov 8, 2011 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) — Limelight Networks, Inc. /quotes/zigman/105873/quotes/nls/llnw LLNW +0.63% today introduced its Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile, an innovative new service that enables publishers to create and manage their mobile web presence. By providing the ability to create mobile-specific sites and repurpose content for multiple devices, the solution ensures that content-rich sites are optimized for every device — regardless of screen size, processing power or bandwidth.
Limelight Dynamic Site Platform for Mobile is built on the company’s cloud-based Dynamic Site Platform to integrate all web content management tasks — saving time and money while ensuring that publishers’ brands are expressed consistently across all online platforms. Using industry-standard languages (XML, HTML, CSS and Javascript), it allows web designers to create mobile sites that leverage the content and features already built into corporate sites. The solution eliminates the need for a separate mobile CMS, further speeding time to market.
Read More: MarketWatch
Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL Share Display Inventory
Still no merger news, but Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL have agreed to share unsold “premium” display inventory among their respective ad networks.
The partnership, announced Tuesday, appeals directly to Madison Avenue’s desire for scalable reach — something that has been increasingly hard to come by via TV, but not yet achievable online.
“This agreement should begin to change the industry’s perception of premium” inventory, Ross Levinsohn, Yahoo EVP of the Americas, said on a conference call late Tuesday.
More to the point, “this is about differentiation,” Levinsohn added, in response to a direct question about increasing competition from Google and Facebook, and whether their rise brought Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft together.
A clear and present threat, Facebook and Google are expected to increase their share of domestic display advertising this year by 9.3% and 16.3%, respectively, according to eMarketer.
Yet by adding greater scale into the equation, the partners hope the deal will increase demand for their premium display ad offerings.
Read More: MediaPost
DataXu Launches DX3 Platform Integrating Social, Video, Display, Mobile
DataXu will release the next generation of its digital marketing platform, DX3, to support advertisers through audience, inventory, campaign management, and analytics. The platform, which will launch Monday, allows marketers to optimize across profitable audience segments, media channels, and creative messages. DX3 combines demand-side platform (DSP) features with attribution management. It combines social, video, display and mobile, with search on the way.
Consider that DX3 makes 300 million decisions per second and 1 trillion decisions an hour, as data updates to understand the technology required to support a maturing ad industry. DataXu claims that impression-level multivariate decisioning reduces media costs by up to 60%; and audience overlap management, such as de-duplication between data sets, yields 25% return on investment and 20% reduction in data costs.
Through a dashboard powered by machine-learning technology, DX3 provides advertisers like Scripps Networks with programmatic buying of ads across display, social, mobile, and video, and premium private, guaranteed, and exchange-traded media. It supports Active analytics to convert consumer and campaign insights into actions in real time. Unified audience management combines first and third-party data to create custom audience segments. And Multitouch attribution allocates spending to the best-performing media channels.
Read More: MediaPost
Rocket Fuel Platform Defines Value Of Facebook Ad Campaigns
Rocket Fuel will release technology Monday that helps marketers understand the value of Facebook ad campaigns as a stand-alone strategy or when integrating the medium with mobile, display and search. Social Booster for Facebook automates creation, monitoring and management through intelligent bidding, multivariate creative testing, segmentation, automated optimization, and cross-channel analytics. The data includes first- and third-party, social, Web, weather, search, retargeting, and more.
The platform optimizes campaigns every 10 minutes. It can build mass-scale audiences by understanding how the smaller segments — micro-segments — operate, according to Richard Frankel, Rocket Fuel president and cofounder. “If you build lots of them, you can build super-scalable media for major brands to better understand in greater amount of detail how consumers interact with brands,” he said.
The age of audience buying is over, replaced by micro-segments, Frankel said. Rather than treating 20 million people as men ages 25 to 34, break down the massive segment into smaller bits — for example, 26-year-old single men who live in Wichita and buy electronics. The challenge is that to make it work for a big marketer you need many, he said.
Read More: MediaPost
