Archive for September, 2008
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Amid the Advertising Week hubbub in New York City, Yahoo! has announced the launch of its new ad platform, APT, largely dependent on the Right Media Exchange acquired last year by Yahoo!.
With Yahoo!’s Newspaper Consortium desperate for revenues, they will be the first to try out the new platform followed by advertisers, agencies and ad networks according to Paid Content who covered Yahoo!’s APT event.
It should be noted Yahoo!’s Publisher Network contextual technology, or a reasonable facsimile, could be a key component for realizing the value of newspapers’ online inventory. With contextual placement in each day’s news an important targeting capability for advertisers, it would seem that even though advertisers can buy sites through Right Media, wouldn’t it be compelling to buy “Home and Garden”, too?
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Tags: adex, advertising exchange, apt, google doubleclick, right media, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News, Online Advertising | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
It’s official.
AOL’s long-rumored entry into the advertising exchange business is here and covered in today’s edition of MediaWeek by Mike Shields among other online news outlets.
According to the release:
“BidPlace will allow advertisers to submit bids for CPM, CPC and CPA advertising on AOL, on select partner sites and on Platform-A’s third-party network, which combined reaches 90% of the online audience, according to the August 2008 comScore Media Metrix report.”
BidPlace? Hmmm. We’re surprised they wanted to use this name – kinda generic. But, it’s AOL. It must have been vetted, right? (bidplace.com points to a domain squatter.)
As Mike Shields points out, BidPlace is an ad exchange, remnant play and gives AOL another opportunity to increase revenues of their massive, non-premium, remnant inventory.
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Tags: advertising exchange, aol, bidplace
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
A favorite bugaboo with which publishers like to challenge ad exchanges and networks is latency – the amount of time it takes to serve an ad. RightMedia appears to be suffering a bad case of it according to yesterday’s VentureBeat.
VB adds that there is a ton of research out there saying the loss in revenue due to latency in advertiser campaigns is real and significant.
RightMedia confesses in the article and blames it on rapid growth:
“As with all rapid growth, [Right Media has] also faced some recent performance issues with latency of ad serving. We deeply regret the impact this may have had on our customer’s businesses.”
In the post, VentureBeat’s Jake Swearingen asks for more input from the advertising community. We’ll be curious what he turns up.
Tags: Advertising Exchanges, latency, rightmedia, venturebeat
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Roger Williams, Director of International Marketing at Right Media, was able to place a nice article in UK’s Net Imperative on online advertising exchanges entitled, “Platforms for Change“.
Within the advertiser-focused article are the basics to the Right Media Exchange story including providing tools to advertisers that allow efficient targeting through an open auction. Williams provides examples of ad exchange platforms developing online for other mediums such as MediaEquals, “an online trading platform for offline media covering press, inserts and display, as well as outdoor,” and Bid4Spots which “hosts a weekly online auction of radio spots available the following broadcast week.”
What’s missing in this article is a cohesive argument for brand-safe opportunities for the advertiser. Near the end, Williams takes a shot at it:
“For any online business, brand sanctity is a real concern, which makes the controls offered by exchanges very important. Without this level of control, the dramatic level of growth in exchanges would not have been possible.”
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Tags: right media exchange, UK, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
ClickZ media buying writer, Tessa Wegert, completes the second of her two-parter on ad exchanges this week. See #2 on ClickZ: “Getting to Know the Ad Exchanges.”
Wegert highlights just four of the ad exchanges – only Google/DoubleClick, Yahoo!’s Right Media Exchange (RMX), ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ and Microsoft AdECN were worthy of mention to Wegert. (GlamX, AdBrite, what happened to Turn?, BlueKai, Traffiq)
But, any article on ad exchanges at this early stage of the game is a good article even when its filled with exchange-supplied marketing speak. Example of said speak comes in the AdECN blurb:
“AdECN calls its pricing model “value-based pricing”; through its auction system, advertisers can buy on a per-impression basis and pay only what they deem an impression to be worth to them and their clients.”
Oh really?
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Tags: ad exchanges, adsdaq, clickz, contextweb, doubleclick, google, microsoft adecn, right media exchange
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Monday, September 15th, 2008
In Friday’s edition of MediaPost, Turn, Inc. announced that it has opened a four-person New York office to serve as its East Coast headquarters.
“Jim Clark, the company’s regional vice president for East Coast sales, will lead the branch, which is expected to add two more people by year’s end.”
For the complete release on Turn’s website, click here.
It is curious to note that Turn is calling itself “the Smart Market” and there is no mention of the word ad exchange in the release. Has Turn changed it’s mind? MediaPost calls it an “ad network.”
We’re guessing that with the current “remnant” connotation for exchanges, Turn may be trying to push a “premium” solution that hasn’t resonated as “remnant” with brand advertisers thus far.
Tags: ad exchange, advertising exchange, turn
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Monday, September 15th, 2008
Bill Morrison, Senior Analyst at ThinkPanmure and one of the few Wall Street analysts with an understanding of ad exchanges, stated in his industry report released today that advertising is entering Phase II of a media recession. Morrison explains his thinking:
“First, marketers reduce spot market activity and eliminate quarterly budget flushes. Then, marketers begin canceling “up-front” commitments and previously signed advertising contracts. Lastly, marketers begin to rationalize/reduce budgets for future years. Our research suggests that we entered phase two of the current media recession during 3Q. Our recent conversations with online publishers revealed a significant number of advertisers that have cancelled contracts or significantly reduced commitments for the second half of 2008. The majority of industry contacts we spoke with this quarter said fundamentals weakened from 2Q to 3Q.”
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Tags: advertising exchange, bill morrison, media recession, thinkpanmure
Posted in Analysts | No Comments »
Saturday, September 13th, 2008
According to CNET’s Stephanie Olsen, Bellevue, Washington-based, BlueKai will unveil its new ad exchange on Monday.
After raising a $3.1 million investment from Redpoint Ventures in Q1 of this year, the company founded by Medio Systems and Revenue Science advertising executive Omar Tawakol is ready to tell what all the secrecy has been about these past few months.
In Olsen’s interview with Tawakol that was published this past Friday, Tawakol revealed BlueKai is creating a data ad exchange centered around behavioral ad targeting.
Olsen describes how it will work in the simplest terms:
“One targeting trick is to collect data about what someone does at one site, (e.g., reading a Las Vegas travel article at CNN.com), and then target an ad (e.g., cheap flights to Vegas) while they’re visiting another site.
BlueKai wants to play middleman in that equation.”
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Tags: advertising exchange, Analytics, bluekai
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
In ClickZ today, writer Tessa Wegert elevates the ad exchange cause with her article entitled, “Understanding Ad Exchanges.” Ironically, the article is sponsored by ad network, Tribal Fusion. Not sure how TF felt about it – oh well.
Wegert discusses one of the main differences between ad networks and exchanges: ad networks act as middlemen, ad exchanges provide tools for buyers and sellers to come together and trade advertising.
Nice to see the ad trades catch the ad exchange drift, again. Wegert points to Yahoo!’s integration plans for Right Media, ContextWeb’s recent funding, (she forgot Turn – they received big bucks, too) and the press release juggernaut Glam Media with its GlamX vertical ad exchange as recent, ad exchange, momentum milestones.
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Tags: ad exchanges, Advertising Exchanges, clickz
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Joe Mullin, a reporter for IP Law & Business, has provided insight on his blog regarding a patent violation lawsuit that is making its way through the courts and affects many of the larger advertising technology companies including Yahoo (ad exchange Right Media’s owner), Google (DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange), ContextWeb (ADSDAQ), and Specific Media.
The gyst of Mullin’s post is how Facebook managed to get out of the suit – apparently without any settlement due to the litigating company, PA Advisors.
Read Mullin’s “Prior Art” blog for the patent details.
Tags: adsdaq, Advertising Exchanges, advertising technology, contextweb, doubleclick, google
Posted in Online Advertising, Publishers | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
It appears the advertising world is starting to get physical about the pending integration of Google and Yahoo advertising – a deal brokered amidst Yahoo!’s flirtation with Microsoft regarding acquisition of the struggling Sunnyvale company.
As Erica Morphy details in her E-Commerce Times article, traditional advertisers, agencies and its lobbying arm, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), are getting the message that a Google-Yahoo deal is bad for everyone except Google.
Anti-trust allegations against the Big G have continued to surface and yesterday’s WSJ added to the pile-on with their own coverage of the ANA announcement and paraphrased the head of the ANA, Bob Liodice, as saying that on balance the proposed deal is a negative for advertisers as search concentrates in the hands of Google.
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Tags: advertising exchange, ana, google, traffiq, yahoo
Posted in Online Advertising | No Comments »
Monday, September 8th, 2008
According to a statement by Alibaba Group Chairman, Jack Ma, brandrepublic reported late last week that the Alibiba Group is combining Alimama and Taobao.com increase the opportunity for advertisers and publishers.
Alimama is the online advertising exchange under Alibaba and Taobao.com is an e-commerce site according to the article.
We cannot confirm any of this due to our lack of chinese language skills.
Here’s a screenshot of the Alimama website in case you don’t want to clickthrough and look:
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Tags: advertising exchange, alimama, asia
Posted in International | No Comments »
Friday, September 5th, 2008
It would seen that the few advertising exchange blogs that exist took a summer hiatus but yesterday, Right Media’s blog came alive (courtesy of Becca Bullack in Publisher Solutions?) with an announcement regarding a new ad network partner, Meta Network, which has plugged into the exchange.
For the little publisher, the Meta Network opportunity will translate into a 60% revenue share and a supersonic Net 7 payment terms. It’s not clear if these payment terms are just for the month of September or, as Muhammad Ali would say, for “All Tiiiiime!”
Editor’s note: Right Media and other exchanges should be posting daily on their blogs with any info they have: soft news like a new ad net partner or how-to’s on buying online ad inventory. Raising the profile of advertising exchanges today brings the promise of online ad trading that much faster. Quick – somebody tell Decker!
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Tags: ad exchange, advertising exchange, meta network, right media
Posted in Ad Networks | No Comments »
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
The sky is falling in the world of online display advertising!
Actually, Paid Content makes it sound like JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan awoke from a nap:
“Sensing that marketers are becoming more conservative with their ad spend, Khan expects that long-tail advertisers will shift toward performance-based advertising forms.” Yawn.
Looks like it’s only going to be 14% year-over-year growth instead of 20% according to Imran – and only $8.2 billion in online display advertising business instead of $8.6 billion
Imran believes that marketers are looking at the purchase funnel and saying, “Where can I drive bottom line revs with my ad spend and prove to my boss that I am a brilliant online advertising strategist so that he will sign off on my expenses which include those delicious steak lunches?” The easy answer is search, no doubt.
This slump should not happen.
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Tags: Advertising Exchanges, display advertising, Online Advertising
Posted in Analysts | 1 Comment »
