Archive for the ‘Data-Driven Thinking’ Category
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
“Data-Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Amiad Solomon, CEO at Peer39.
When watching an NFL or NASCAR event on TV, you expect that most of the commercials aired will be for beer, restaurants, shavers, or cars. Although television does not possess the granular targeting technologies we utilize online, advertisers are expert in predicting what sort of audience these events will attract and they buy ad time accordingly. It’s the proven way to reach an audience.
Reaching audience at scale in the digital environment proved to be much more complicated. With content distributed across nearly infinite locations, it became nearly impossible to build critical mass in audience by targeting to specific types of content alone. It became necessary to for advertisers to work with behavioral and audience targeting providers, who could leverage cookies and vast content networks. This became the one way to reach targeted audiences at scale to meet campaign goals online – buying audiences using in-market and other traditional data sets.
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Tags: amiad solomon, Data, display advertising, media buying
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Thursday, February 11th, 2010
“Data-Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Andy Monfried, CEO at Lotame.
There’s been a lot of chatter in the marketplace of late on the evolving nature of DSPs, networks, SSPs, agencies, and data providers. Like it or not, direct response advertisers have moved the market—they started with ad networks over 10 years ago, took early control of search advertising, were among the first buyers of mass exchange inventory, and now gobble up cookies in DSPs.
Good for them.
If you look at the list of Fortune’s top 1,000 companies, Inc’s 500, or Forbes biggest companies, few of them sell or will ever sell products online at scale. Even for those that do, to wit, I suddenly didn’t wake up this morning and intend to buy an iTouch for my twins; there was awareness, which Apple has done across all media, consideration, deliberation, favorability, and finally intent. The current rush to the bottom of the purchase funnel devalues or otherwise ignores the top.
What constitutes a disproportionate share of buying on Demand Side Platforms today?
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Tags: andy monfried, demand-side platforms, display advertising, DSP, DSPs, lotame
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Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
“Data-Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Ajay Sravanapudi, CEO at LucidMedia.
Demand Side Platforms (DSP) are hot! I can tell by the huge agency interest, and even more eager venture capitalists anxious to get in on the latest craze. Traditional ad networks and newfangled technology platforms are declaring themselves to be DSPs. Others who did much of the evangelical spadework for DSPs appear to be stung by the sudden rush. There is now an attempt to define a “true DSP”. At this stage, a “true DSP” as defined by a list of features serves little purpose and is as much a disservice to the industry, as it is disconnected from reality. In fact, many of the current DSP competitors—those with the most significant solutions already in-market—are successfully violating that definition of a “true DSP” to the benefit of their agencies partners.
The truth is that a “fully self-service DSP” would be far too disruptive to most agencies at this early stage. There are far too many levers, knobs and buttons in a DSP robust enough to deliver the optimum cross-section of pacing, performance, and price for an agency to take on today. They range from mundane tasks like dealing with objectionable impressions and buys from non real-time sources to more arcane optimization tasks, RTB source integration, bidding strategies, discrepancy management, and post-campaign reconciliation.
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Tags: demand-side platforms, display advertising, DSP, lucid media, lucidmedia
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Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Zach Coelius, CEO of Triggit, an online advertising technology company.
Last week the folks at Admeld threw a tremendous event on the topic of Real-Time Bidding (RTB) at the Time Warner Center in NYC. There were hundreds of people in attendance talking about RTB, DSPs and our emerging space. One of the conversation topics that emerged was how to define the various terms, and in particular: What is a Demand-Side Platform? As someone who has been in the space since the very beginning, before we were even called DSPs, it was exhilirating to see enthusiasm from so many in defining what it is we do.
So, what is the proper definition for a DSP? As a technologist, my predilection is to focus on the technology innovations making this whole space possible, the most important being the advent of RTB. RTB has enabled a single platform to connect to multiple disparate inventory sources and make real-time buying decisions on each impression-by-impression. Buying decisions are thus powerfully transferred from the inventory vendor directly to the actual media buyer.
In the past, if this media buyer wanted to buy media, they would work with a provider like Right Media, ValueClick, Google or one of the tens of thousands of publishers and ad networks out there. Ad buys were achieved by either inputting rules-based buying instructions on various fragmented interfaces, working with an account rep, or using an API to communicate with an ad server. Once these buying instructions were defined, a provider would serve an ad, and make a buy, when an impression occurred on that particular network or site fit within the defined criteria. Buyers could then login to run reports, optimize campaigns or make minor tweaks and changes. Media buyers (and their clients) who needed mass impression inventory would have to perform this task over dozens, if not hundreds, of sources to achieve scale, since in this highly fragmented space no provider has a dominant share of the inventory. A big agency could work with as many as a thousand digital media vendors when you count the publishers, exchanges, ad networks, and intermediaries. Suddenly, buyers were logging into numerous interfaces, pulling and collating disparate reports and are left trusting dozens of black boxes to run their ads in the right places. Very simply, the fragmentation in the display space made digital media buying a nightmare. Moreover, the vendor was in control of where the ads ran, which inhibited transparency and targeting for the buyer.
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Tags: display advertising, media buying
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Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Ken Rona, PhD, V.P. Data Strategy and Client Analytics at [x+1].
Over the last couple of years, I have been in the data business, selling and buying, respectively. My colleagues call me “the data guy.” But I don’t think about my work that way at all. As I see it, I am a user of data; I provide data-driven advice (and I think our clients would agree). But, when I am faced with a new business problem, the first thing I do is spend some time understanding where the data comes from. I analyze how the variables are defined; I ask for the data dictionary; I get some descriptive statistics. One other thing I do is ask “What rights do we have to the data?” That is, what can I contractually do with the data? This opens up an important issue – what’s known as data rights.
At a previous employer, my teams had access to the entire US household file. By that, I mean that we had data for every single household in the United States. That’s a lot of data. We would use the data for customer insight and database marketing. As far as I was concerned, if the data were in the database, we could use it for anything we wanted It was someone else’s job to make sure we could use the data. I never thought about it at the time, but in fact we did not own the data. We rented it. Data from third parties is not sold, it is licensed.
Then, when I worked for a company that provided data to others, I became aware of “data rights.” When we licensed the data, we specified what a customer could do with the data. I am not a lawyer, but the idea is that a user of data acquires certain rights to use data in ways that are specified by legal agreements. The more rights the user wants, the more the data provider gets to charge for the data.
You could think of the length of time of an agreement, or term, as the simplest right. The term, specifies how long you have access to the data – say for a year or a campaign.
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Tags: Data, data management, demand-side platforms, xplusone
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Monday, February 8th, 2010
“Data-Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Scott Portugal, CRO at TRAFFIQ.
Audience targeting has come a long way, baby. In the last 5 years, we’ve evolved from simple intra-site and intra-network retargeting to advanced, algorithmically-driven audience targeting across the web with multi-variant data sources. Customized segmentation is available across an ever-growing list of data suppliers, and audiences can be analyzed & targeted based on buying history, content engagement, offline data sources, social media engagement, etc. It’s a Chinese-menu of demography, psychography, and implied attributes that is simultaneously exciting and dangerous.
Much of the dialogue around data today is focused around appropriate best practices; providing clear disclosure of data utilization, easy opt-out paths, consumer awareness campaigns, and more. The consumer will be empowered with greater and greater controls to determine what data is used by whom. If we operate from the principle that in the near future a détente will be reached between digital marketing professionals and consumers (including data privacy lobbyists), there will still be a great unanswered question: who owns the data?
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, data management, scott portugal, traffiq
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Sunday, February 7th, 2010
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Nat Turner, CEO, at Invite Media.
If you asked a group of people in the display industry to pick the biggest theme for display in 2010, I would be surprised if it wasn’t the concept of real-time bidding and the advent of the so-called “demand-side platform” (DSP). It seems that there’s a new “DSP” launching every week these days, each with its own twist or differentiation. Over the last several years, I’ve met or spoken with a number of agencies and marketers on the topic.
The good news is that many of these buyers have started to realize the massive potential impact that a DSP technology can bring to the table. The bad news, however, is that their decision-making process for figuring out what this all means has become extremely muddled and complex (and is only getting worse). What I’ve realized is that very few people really know what a “true DSP” is or how to evaluate one (and to no fault of their own), or even how to tell one DSP apart from another. Any company can claim anything on their website; any company can build a nice PowerPoint deck or tell a great story about real-time bidding or rocket science optimization. At the end of the day, what really matters is that the agency makes the right decision for their client(s) and chooses a well-evaluated and thoughtful path in order to take advantage of this tectonic shift happening in the industry.
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Tags: demand-side plaform, DSP, DSPs, invite media, nat turner
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Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Brad Terrell is VP and General Manager of Digital Media at Netezza, a data warehouse and analytic appliances company.
Agency holding firms face significant strategic and operational challenges in adapting to the digital transformation of the advertising industry. Data-driven competitors are shaking up the market and threatening to disrupt their current positions of power.
So what? This is not exactly news. The WPP Group’s Sir Martin Sorrell made the threat clear years ago when he dubbed Google a “frenemy.” Agencies and technology firms are increasingly encroaching on one another’s turf, making it critically important that every firm identify and leverage their sources of differentiation for competitive advantage.
Unique resources are the building blocks of a firm’s competitive advantage. Creative talent is arguably one of the most prized resources within an agency. Significant client relationships are also difficult for competitors to reproduce. Most importantly, the agency holding firm model that emerged in the 1980’s in response to media consolidation and globalization made scale an important resource. Scale gives agencies the global reach required to serve worldwide clients and the buying power required to negotiate the best possible advertising rates.
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Tags: Data, Data-Driven Thinking, display advertising, media buying, netezza
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Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Pascal Bensoussan, VP of Products at Aggregate Knowledge, a buy-side optimization platform.
Over the last two years, ad exchanges have brought an unprecedented level of targeting and efficiency to display advertising. However, early adopters may have already reaped the greatest benefits of the ad exchanges (the lowest hanging fruit has already been eaten). Over the next two years, as adoption grows and more ad exchanges, ad networks, and publishers fight for the same cookies, it is going to become increasingly more difficult to achieve sustainable value from media arbitrage decisions.
The true winners of the ad exchange era will be those few companies that will be able to leverage a company-wide business strategy, a proven operational discipline, and a unified platform to excel in the following three areas:
- Centralized data collection and custom audience management
- Cookie-level retargeting and impression-level bidding
- Creative optimization and personalization
Everyone else will merely fight for what’s left.
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Tags: ad agency, ad exchange, ad exchanges, Data-Driven Thinking, media buying
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Thursday, January 7th, 2010
“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Zach Coelius, CEO of Triggit, an online advertising technology company.
It would be hard not to notice that display media buying is changing dramatically.
Interesting new companies are popping up left and right, VCs are making significant bets, and the big boys- Google, Yahoo, the agency holding companies, and the old-line media giants- are making moves in the space. Display advertising once thought to be an unmitigated disaster is now discussed on earnings calls and in boardrooms as the next hot opportunity for growth.
At the core, the changes we have been seeing in the space over the last year are centered on innovations in how we manage, allocate and price display inventory. Transparent exchanges, audience data and real time bidding are significant structural developments that enable the entire industry to innovate and improve. But while we were concentrating on improving, something even more important has happened. The groundwork we have been laying is starting to get to such scale that it has the potential of solving a much bigger problem: media fragmentation. To understand why this is such an important problem, let’s look at the issues fragmentation causes.
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Tags: ad agency, advertising, marketing, media buying, real-time bidding, rtb, triggit, zach coelius
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Sunday, December 20th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Bill Demas, CEO of Turn Inc., a demand-side platform and ad network provider.
As the first decade of the new millennium comes to a close, the online advertising industry is at an inflection point: We are now entering the era of Display 2.0. Forget all that old school thinking about media buying, audience targeting and the traditional roles once held by agencies, media buyers and service providers in the world of display advertising. The rules of the game are changing.
The display world is going through a classic disruptive innovation precipitated by technological innovations and introductions such as real-time bidding exchanges, privacy-compliant data resellers and exchanges, and of course demand-side platforms. In 2010, we will begin to see the creation of more open platforms, increased systems integration and more powerful analytics to align with – and better tap into – the openness of ad exchanges. Classic ad networks are going to have to adapt to this new world order, beefing up their technology offerings (as some have already done) in order to compete with the exchanges and reinforce the value they bring to advertisers. It will be the end of the party for undifferentiated ad networks targeting brand marketers. Technology, scale, security and strategic expertise will be critical for success.
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Tags: bill demas, display, display advertising, turn
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Thursday, December 10th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Rob Leathern, CEO of CPM Advisors, an online advertising optimization company.
In late 2009, the story of Real-time bidding (RTB) in the display ad space appears to be conforming to a pattern familiar to those in the software and media industries: the hype cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle). We have reached the “peak of inflated expectations” and some might say we are now on our way to the “trough of disillusionment”. Companies on the sell side have announced real-time bidding systems before they existed, or that are actually something quite different (not real-time, not bidding, or neither). Some on the buy side publicly stated they were doing RTB with certain partners before it was even possible, others have publicly and privately said different things. For the record, for our CPMatic buying platform we have been building and testing real-time bidding and related cookie management infrastructure, but it is not (yet) bidding on
real-time inventory as of the writing of this. We will, but will probably NOT put out a press release when we do, though.
There is no doubt that the real story of the value behind RTB is centralized price discovery and streamlined inventory access (and the ability for this to happen at scale), and this will take some time to be realized in a meaningful way and will take widespread publisher adoption of new selling platforms. In the near term until publisher adoption increases though we’ll probably have a bunch of companies bidding in real time against each other for 15% of the ad inventory out there! In some ways RTB may be a red herring that might distract us from the underlying goal of creating a centralized market mechanism that provides quick access to inventory that gets the owner of the inventory the best price for it – RTB could cynically be seen as a way for ad exchanges/hubs outsourcing their decisioning and infrastructure costs to others. More about this later.
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, display advertising, media buying, real-time bidding, rtb
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Monday, December 7th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Paul Martino, CEO of Aggregate Knowledge, a buy-side optimization platform.
There is a widely held belief in the display advertising business that the only way to reach your target audience cost-effectively is via ad exchanges. Not true. While it is cost-effective, the classes of inventory available on exchanges are incomplete. In addition, inexpensive inventory can be found just about anywhere if you know how to buy it. It might be blasphemy to write it here on AdExchanger, but cost-effective inventory is indeed available on ad networks as well as directly from publishers.
For many media plans, especially those for brand campaigns, the ad exchange portion can be small. For larger agency customers, a common media plan can have less than 10 percent of the total buy dedicated to the exchange. Fortunately for these customers, many audience-centric buying features of ad exchanges are available from many ad networks and a number of large publishers.
With that said, all display impressions cannot be traded over an exchange like a commodity. Some placements are unique and come with a number of qualitative benefits that are difficult to sell over an exchange – for example, micro-sites, sponsorships, roadblocks, and page takeovers. Publishers selling those premium placements on a guaranteed basis require an expert sales force that is able to work closely with brand advertisers to integrate advertorial content with their editorial content.
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Tags: ad exchange, Ad Networks, brand advertising, display advertising, media buying
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Friday, December 4th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Ken Rona, PhD, V.P. Data Strategy and Client Analytics at [x+1].
The other day, I was speaking to an ad agency about use of third-party data in online advertising. Toward the end of the talk, someone asked a very interesting question: “If you have buyer propensity or behavioral data, why do you need demographics?”
Hmmm. Why do you need demographics in a world of in-market and intender data? Let me talk a little bit about why demos are useful in online ad targeting, and more specifically, for media targeting.
First, demographics act as useful proxies for life stages and interests. An individual’s life stage and interests are powerful drivers of purchase intent. In fact, demos serve as inputs to the models used to create intender/interest segments (but not in-market status). They are foundational.
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Tags: ad exchange, Data, display advertising, media buying
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Monday, October 26th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Pascal Bensoussan, VP of Products at Aggregate Knowledge, a buy-side optimization platform.
As the “AdWords-ish-ness” of DoubleClick’s AdX 2.0 interface makes obvious, the goal of today’s exchanges is to bring greater scale and efficiency to the display space. There have been several reactions to this by the advertiser:
- Reaction A: “Great! Media buyers’ ability to cherry pick impressions and effectively price each one will usher in a new era of performance-based marketing.”
- Reaction B: “Rats! These exchanges will force a consolidation of 90% of inventory into the hands of same 3+ Goliaths.”
- Reaction C: “So what?”
Don’t be quick to dismiss perspectives B and C as the view of the naysayers and uninformed. A look at the differences between the display and search marketplaces yields some important insights supporting these views.
Remember, search grew wildly from the widespread adoption of small advertisers who could go create a text ad themselves and fund their campaign on their credit card. Display is the opposite: due to the higher costs of entry, display is a medium-to-large advertiser/agency game. Even with the emergence of self-serve interfaces offering pre-packaged creative templates, the generation of non-amateur-looking display creative with interactive rich media components is beyond the capabilities of the vast majority of small businesses. Layer on the complexity of managing audience data and impression-level bids required for participation in an ad exchange, and most media buyers are brought to their knees.
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Tags: ad exchanges, adwords, Data-Driven Thinking, doubleclick ad exchange
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Thursday, October 8th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a new column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Zach Coelius, CEO of Triggit, an online advertising, media trading company.
As loyal readers of AdExchanger.com know, we are currently seeing a very significant platform shift in the technology that underlies display advertising. One of the most exciting things about this shakeup is that it allows all the players to look around and try to establish a different position in the ecosystem. Companies can use the changing dynamic to enter new markets, intermediate, disintermediate, grow margins, swap spots or simply get run out of the business all together. It is like one giant game of musical chairs with billions of dollars at stake, guaranteed great fun to be had by all.
In this latest round of the game, transparent exchanges, accessible media and real-time bidding (RTB) are playing the tune and all the players are looking around at each other trying to figure out who can use the shakeup to their advantage. Some of these players include: Silicon Valley stalwarts, technology driven startups, high margin ad networks and the creativity and service-driven ad agencies. Who is going to lose their seat?
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, advertising, marketing, media buying, media trading, Online Advertising
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Thursday, October 1st, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a new column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by James Lancelot, Director of Professional Services at Invite Media, a buy-side optimization platform.
In recent years, the traditional agency strategy for DR campaigns has been to work with multiple ad network partners to ensure that their advertiser’s campaign is getting maximum reach. This also can limit an agency’s risk, because if one ad network partner performs poorly, they can be removed from the plan. Being in this position incentivizes the ad network to maintain a high level of performance and service to the agency. The problem with this model however, is that over the past few years more and more unique inventory has been moving away from ad networks and into ad exchanges. In fact, it is rare today to find an ad network that is not doing some kind of exchange inventory buying, and many exclusively buy off of ad exchanges.
The Shift To Audience Targeting
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, advertising, demand-side buying platforms, display advertising, invite media, marketing, media buying
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Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a new column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Ted Shergalis is Chief Strategy Officer of [x+1], a buy side optimization platform.
The benefits of real time exchanges to buy side participants are clear. Both reach and efficiency should improve in an environment where bidders can pick exactly which impressions they’d like to buy. It may seem as though the exchange environment gives the upper hand to the buy side, but little attention has been paid to potential sell side countermoves. What might publishers do to benefit from the rise of the real time exchange?
The short answer: Publishers will become active participants in the exchange system.
Presently, publishers and sellers have a tendency to regard the exchanges just like any other reseller of their inventory. They see exchanges and ad networks as a simple solution to their excess inventory problem, as the exchanges provide a convenient outlet to make a few dollars off the impressions that their direct sales force was not able to sell while keeping their management costs down. Publishers and sellers are fairly indifferent to whether Right Media, DoubleClick, ValueClick or any other reseller monetizes their inventory for them. Traditionally, this lack of interest in what is done with excess inventory has been justified by the fact that most publishers make approximately 80% of their revenue from direct sales of 20% of their inventory.
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, advertising, demand-side buying platform, DSP, marketing, media buying, x+1
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Friday, September 25th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a new column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Pascal Bensoussan, VP of Products at Aggregate Knowledge, a buy-side optimization platform.
In 2006, Greg Stuart, Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO, estimated that advertisers’ waste, that is, impressions reaching the wrong audience or none at all, was $112 billion a year in America and $220 billion worldwide, or just over half of their total spending. Wanamaker was remarkably accurate.
In 2009, we have made little progress. A recent research from ComScore indicates that only a small minority of campaigns reach their intended audience with the desired frequency. Of eight U.S. brand campaigns with budgets between $400,000 and $2 million, ComScore said none reached more than 20 percent of their target with a frequency of four impressions or less. Up to 80 percent of the impressions were delivered either to the wrong segments in the U.S., or to consumers outside the U.S.
A number of factors are to blame for this situation:
1. Reaching audiences based on context is expensive and not particularly effective. Yet, media planners and media buyers are only trained to buy audiences based on the media they consume. It takes a fair amount of interpretation and mapping to turn the target audience defined in a creative brief into a robust media plan. Emerging technologies enabling multi-party cookie synching, real-time decisioning, real-time bidders, and media de-risking with new classes of publishers and ad networks, provide effective means to buy the right audiences directly instead of guessing the web properties they might visit.
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Tags: ad agency, ad exchanges, Ad Networks, Data-Driven Thinking, doubleclick ad exchange, media buying
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Rob Leathern, CEO of CPM Advisors, an online advertising company.
In the online ad business we often get caught up in flawed comparisons to the financial services industry. It’s an “exchange”, “market”, impressions or clicks are seen as a commodity when they are not. Many people reading this right now are building their companies around the notion of correctly valuing an impression and then getting one of their ads there (or else passing it on to someone else), and yet we’re stuck in a place without the data we need to really make a decision.
The Right Media Exchange (RMX) started out as a platform where impressions were mostly seen by the participants as commodities, bought and sold in bulk by ad networks with too many of them or not enough of them, and then sometimes with hope springing eternal, broken into buckets by “channel”: each publisher or network would classify their sites’ traffic into one of 20 or 30 channels like automotive, technology, business or shopping. The ad networks who were RMX’s first clients would use the channel designation to target their campaigns and then the RMX system would take care of bidding differentially based on other elements like user frequency that were harder for humans to manipulate and assess the value of themselves. Of course it turns out there were some other attributes the advertiser side wanted and it was dutifully added in a fairly ad-hoc fashion, like whether the inventory was a website or a desktop application, was there unmoderated UGC on the site, and so on. More recent exchange participants were lured by the promise of billions of commodity-like impressions they could bid on, with a few exclusions of things they didn’t want: but they very quickly learned the wide variance in performance of those impressions they got to see, and the long time it took to hone in on the ones that actually did perform.
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Tags: advertising, cpm advisors, Data, Data-Driven Thinking, demand-side buying platforms, marketing, rob leathern
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