Adobe Completes Acquisition of Efficient Frontier
Today, Adobe solutions are central to how digital marketing and advertising are created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. Our focus on market leadership in the digital marketing space has driven some dramatic changes at Adobe including the recent acquisition of Efficient Frontier, a leader in multi-channel and auction-based digital advertising optimization across search, display and social media.
With Efficient Frontier, Adobe delivers an industry-leading independent platform for digital ad buying to our customers. With this addition to our Digital Marketing Suite, we offer a more powerful solution for managing search, display and social media to better answer the needs of our customers. Even more importantly, we add the expertise of over 300 talented Efficient Frontier employees to our team.
Collective UK Launches Private Exchange for Premium Video Advertising
Collective has today announced the launch of a private marketplace to offer media buying agencies and advertisers real-time bidding (RTB) access to its premium video platform.
Combining Adap.tv’s RTB technology with Collective’s audience data, Collective’s private exchange will offer pre-roll video advertising space across targeted audiences and premium publishers in real-time auctions. Publishers include IPC, WWE, The Independent, Sony Music and iVillage.
The move will see Collective become the first in the UK to launch an RTB private ad marketplace for premium video programming.
“Our marketplace gives advertisers and agency partners a new way to access premium VoD inventory, but with this inventory being in such demand, we don’t see it as a low cost entry to buy video in the UK,” said Jamie Estrin, Director of Collective Video. “RTB pricing is controlled by supply and demand, and high quality premium video is always in high demand in the UK.”
The More Media Buying Changes, the More It Stays the Same
Ten years ago this month, I took over ClickZ’s Media Buying column, and I’ve been writing it every week since. There’s no question that looking back at the last decade feels surreal: so much has changed, both in my personal life (a marriage, a new country, two children, seven moves), and in the online advertising industry. And yet, much has also stayed the same.
What’s different is the “where” of placing digital ads. In the early 2000s, mobile marketing was in its infancy, blogs were largely perceived as a foreign concept with a peculiar name, and video advertising was only just beginning to hit its stride. The technology we now rely on was the stuff of dreams, the tools we use daily to plan campaigns, a fantasy. Throughout these critical developments, however, the “how” of digital media buying has remained surprisingly unchanged – three tenets of the business in particular. Not only have these endured, but they may be more important now than ever.
1. Research. In the days preceding media planning software, online marketing professionals spent much of their time scouring the web for opportunities befitting their expectant clients. Always reach and frequency were top of mind, but so too were the formats that were being offered. Making an informed decision about a potential media partner was about selecting a site that would effectively connect a client’s brand with its audience, but it was also about finding ways to reuse existing ad sizes, saving some room in the budget for experimenting with new formats, and taking calculated risks on sites we hadn’t worked with before.
The Evolution of Online-User Data
The gathering of online-user data is among the most exciting and controversial business issues of our time. It often brings up concerns about privacy, but it also presents extraordinary opportunities for personalized, one-to-one advertising. This article is the first in a series exploring the importance of personal data across different industries. It represents a joint effort of The Boston Consulting Group, Goldman Sachs, and BlueKai.
The Importance of User Data
The basic appeal is straightforward: the more a company knows about someone, the easier it should be to target relevant ads to that person. All the stakeholders in the digital-advertising ecosystem—from Google to ad networks to Expedia—are collecting as much information as possible about what their users are doing online.
Over the past five years, we have seen the development of a robust secondary market allowing the buying and selling of user profiles. If someone goes to a travel site to book a room in a Tokyo hotel, for instance, that site can then sell the user’s profile to an ad network via a user data exchange or an aggregator. The next time the user visits a website served by that network, an ad for the Tokyo Hilton might appear.
There are several underlying supply, that is, advertiser, trends that have driven interest in building these profiles:
A Shift in Campaign Strategies. Advertisers are increasingly moving away from campaigns based on cost-per-thousand data (the cost of reaching 1,000 page views) and toward cost-per-click or cost-per-action strategies, in which advertisers pay only when a qualifying action, such as a purchase or registration, takes place. Ad networks and agencies leverage user data to more effectively target ads in hopes of improving click-through rates, that is, how often a user clicks on an advertisement.
