“Ad Agents” is a column written by the agency-side of the digital media community.
Adam Cahill is SVP, Director of Digital Media at Hill Holliday, a full-service communications agency.
Ad exchanges were undoubtedly the digital world’s Rookie of the Year in 2009, but in terms of buzz, the industry has moved on (it’s all “mobile, mobile, mobile” these days).
In order to avoid a sophomore slump, we’ll have to grow this space the old-fashioned way: proving it out, campaign by campaign.
Here are three suggestions that strike me as solid ways to make sure that exchanges don’t stall out in 2010.
One: Deliver on the Promise of Real-time Bidding
The benefit of exchanges is not to get marginally cheaper inventory than is possible through networks, but today too many of the impressions flowing through exchanges are just “cheap reach.” The longer we play the cheap reach game, the more exchanges look just like networks, and the easier they’ll be to dismiss.
I understand that Real-time Bidding still represents only a small percentage of the total exchange inventory, but we need to start seeing how that inventory can lead to tangibly different approaches and results. Instead of buying a ton of fifty-cent impressions, I look forward to paying a huge premium for one perfectly targeted impression, and removing waste altogether.
Digital media has caused huge shifts in the advertising industry, including the rise of the Digital-Driven Media Agency — media shops that have identified digital media as the key strategic focus for their organization. Management teams at these agencies have set aggressive goals to increase the share of billings coming from digital. Many agencies have collapsed separate print, broadcast, and online divisions, instead forming integrated planning groups led by “digital thinking.”