Archive for April, 2009
Thursday, April 30th, 2009
ContextWeb announced that it will allow real-time bidding on its inventory through an API. It’s unclear from the press release if the API is currently “live” to clients. Nevertheless, this could be an exciting opportunity for advertisers who will be able to optimize on the “demand” end.
“With ADSDAQ’s Real Time API, the ADSDAQ Exchange will offer pre-filtered ad impressions to the buyer with HTTP parameters and a referrer URL or Publisher ID, the User’s IP address, anonymized cookie ID of the user and any ad unit restrictions (restricted advertisers, creative types, product verticals). “
Tim Armstrong lives! Platform-A gave Greg Coleman his second severance package in two years according to Kara Swisher at All Things D. Perhaps Coleman will return to NetSeer where he worked until he left for Platform-A? At Yahoo! Coleman was EVP for Global Sales and took Yahoo!’s ad sales from $500M to nearly $7B in seven-years. Jeff Levick, formerly of Google, will replace Coleman.
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, blue lithium, doubleclick adx, google, real-time bidding, rtb, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
David Moore is the Chairman & Founder of 24/7 Real Media, a WPP company.
AdExchanger.com: Doesn’t it follow that there is channel conflict between ad networks and large publisher sites with sales teams? What must ad networks do, if anything, to make sure that publishers do not feel like they’re inventory is being cannibalized?
DM: Sales conflicts never occur with networks if the relationship is established correctly from the beginning. Some large publisher sites do not want their name included in the list of sites that compose the network. This means that their inventory is sold blind and yields a lower return to the publisher. Other large publisher sites recognize that including their name will generate better advertising returns for them and their partners. When this is allowed, the network must carefully inform the advertiser that there is no guarantee of how many impressions are delivered to each site in the network, i.e., that the advertisement is rotated equitably among all the sites in the network. 24/7 has not had a sales conflict in over 10 years.
Do large media companies need to face the fact that they are never going to get the CPMs they once did whether online or off?
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Tags: 247 Real Media, ad exchanges, Ad Networks, media agency, wpp group
Posted in Ad Networks | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
Jason Krebs is President of ShortTail Media.
AdExchanger.com: What must ad networks do, if anything, to make sure that publishers do not feel like they’re inventory is being cannibalized?
JK: The reality is they are being cannibalized by most networks. The networks make the publishers feel like they are not being cannibalized by sending them nice checks every month.
How’s business? Can you give us a sense of revenue momentum at ShortTail Media and where you’re seeing strengths and weaknesses?
Business is “okay.” We’re making progress but it’s never as fast as you’d like it to be. Visibility is about 6 weeks out. We’re seeing strength in consumer products, food/beverage, entertainment and travel. We’re very excited about a new video ad platform we are launching this summer called the Digital 30. Stay tuned for more on that.
How does ShortTail differentiate itself from other ad networks?
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Tags: ad exchange, Ad Networks, premium inventory, short tail media
Posted in Ad Networks | No Comments »
Monday, April 27th, 2009
Joe Zawadzki is CEO of MediaMath, a media trading solutions provider.
AdExchanger.com: When “last we left” MediaMath, the New York Times had just featured you. What’s been happening over the past 9 months? Any updates you can share about traction, product line, etc.?
JZ: We’ve been fortunate to continue our two-year consistent growth trajectory, despite the broader economic challenges in the market. In fact, the greater focus on ROI accountability in today’s market has actually accelerated the adoption of our platform (a trend we didn’t call when we started the company). As a profitable firm, we’ve been able to “lean in” to this opportunity while others have pulled back, building out an already great team of smart, passionate, and nice folks (a rare combination, imho!).
In Q1 of this year we released our SaaS media trading platform that allows our agency clients to opt for either the turnkey results of our managed service offering, or a self-service and whitelabelled offering giving them the tools, technology, and training to do media trading in-house, informed by the MediaMath lessons learned from the monthly execution of millions of dollars in spend and billions of impressions bought.
It’s been really fun, although it takes until Sunday morning for the kids to warm up to dad again.
Any insights you can share in online display advertising such as overall eCPMs, CTRs, category trends, etc.?
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchange, media buying, media math
Posted in Ad Exchange News | 2 Comments »
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
What a week!
Great insight from a growing list of key industry figures in the ad exchange space on AdExchanger.com. Heady advertising technology excitement from the past week’s Ad:Tech San Francisco show. Apparently, Ad:Tech has not lost any steam in spite of the economy if the Twitter buzz is to be believed.
There is a feeling – maybe not a tipping point (but close) – that the advertising world is about to take off on the back of the exchange model which begs the question: who will own the exchange eventually? We suggest that short term and long term, the answer is the same: no one.
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Tags: ad exchanges, advertisers, Agencies, google, yahoo, Yield Optimization
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
Darren Herman is the Founder and President of Varick Media Management, the audience and media platform backed by MDC Partners, one of the world’s leading advertising holding companies.
AdExchanger.com: Varick Media Management appears to be gaining traction according to your press release in January. Any updates?
DH: Our heads have been down at VMM focusing on building our business in every conceivable metric including revenues, staff, relationships, performance, and client wins. It seems as the press release we issued in January about the early VMM success really opened the door to some big named brands and agencies that have become our clients over time. Since we’re a relatively small organization trying to manage growth, we have to be picky with the clients that we work with in order to deliver top notch service and we have been really fortunate with the client base that we’ve been serving over the past 8 months.
Have you seen a change in your clients’ thinking as the economy has shifted into low gear in the past year?
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, agency, mdc partners, media buying, varick media management
Posted in Agencies | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009
Henry Wong is Chief Executive Officer of Adgregate Markets, a transactional performance ad network.
AdExchanger.com: Given you and your team’s experience (AdECN), how important is your familiarity with ad exchanges in the success of Adgregate Markets?
HW: Given the experience of the management team with AdECN, we understand the value that ad exchanges can bring to our ShopAds technology and platform in terms of being able to offer advertisers bleeding edge targeting and retargeting tools to execute performance based advertising campaigns. Adgregate Markets’ ShopAds is the first certified transactional advertising technology to integrate with AdECN; which enables advertisers to use Microsoft’s platform for ad targeting and retargeting, media purchasing and placement, and ad optimization.
Can you describe the challenge Adgregate Markets technology solves as well as a sense of scale for your business currently?
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, Ad Networks, adgregate markets, shopads
Posted in Online Advertising | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Tom Shields is Chief Executive Officer of yield optimization company, Yieldex.
AdExchanger.com: How many participating publishers?
TS: We have announced Martha Stewart Omnimedia as our first publisher partner. We are currently engaged with a number of other large publishers that we are not publicizing yet.
What is your target publisher market? Can any publisher participate?
Our target market is publishers who have a direct sales force and who want to maximize their revenue on premium inventory. While any publisher could participate, we are ideally suited for larger publishers who have their own sales team.
Do you consider your company’s model full-service or self-service?
We provide tools and technology solutions for publishers to gain a deeper understanding of their premium inventory, and provide recommendations to help them optimize their yield. These tools are used by each publisher’s in-house sales and operations teams. We manage the integration of the Yieldex solution, and provide services to our publishers to ensure they are taking full advantage of our tools to maximize their revenue.
What are the advantages of a yield optimization company?
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Tags: ad exchange, Yield Optimization, yieldex
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Tom Shields is Chief Executive Officer of yield optimization company, Yieldex.
AdExchanger.com: How many participating publishers?
TS: We have announced Martha Stewart Omnimedia as our first publisher partner. We are currently engaged with a number of other large publishers that we are not publicizing yet.
What is your target publisher market? Can any publisher participate?
Our target market is publishers who have a direct sales force and who want to maximize their revenue on premium inventory. While any publisher could participate, we are ideally suited for larger publishers who have their own sales team.
Do you consider your company’s model full-service or self-service?
We provide tools and technology solutions for publishers to gain a deeper understanding of their premium inventory, and provide recommendations to help them optimize their yield. These tools are used by each publisher’s in-house sales and operations teams. We manage the integration of the Yieldex solution, and provide services to our publishers to ensure they are taking full advantage of our tools to maximize their revenue.
What are the advantages of a yield optimization company?
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Tags: ad exchange, Yield Optimization, yieldex
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Michael Katz is President and Founder of InterClick.
AdExchanger.com: Is it more difficult being a public company than private in the advertising industry? Does this give an advantage to your competitors?
Good question, I get asked this a lot. There have been many advantages and disadvantages to being public. I think being public has provided us with credibility among advertisers and publishers. Relationships are still a key driver in this industry, being public has given us a sense of credibility and in turn allowed us to build trust with our partners. In addition, being public has required us to focus on continuous operational improvement. Sometimes you need to be backed into a corner to really excel and being a public company has required us to be focused on revenue growth, margin improvement and operational efficiency via better supply chain management. Obviously the capital markets could be a little better than they are right now but that’s not anything we can control so its not something we tend to worry too much about.
Can you give us a sense of revenue and product momentum for InterClick? Any observations on the online ad industry you’re seeing as a whole right now?
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, Ad Networks, disintermediation, interclick
Posted in Ad Networks | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
Jeremy Liew is Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners, a global venture capital firm, and frequently writes on the LSVP blog.
AdExchanger.com: In your April 6 LSVP blog post, you say there will be more ad networks not less. Why?
JL: There are four elements that you need to be able to run a successful ad network:
- Access to inventory – which has become commoditized by the ad exchanges.
- Good data for targeting – which is becoming commoditized through companies such as Lookery and Blue Kai
- Good targeting algorithms – which is often over-rated – more data usually beats a better algorithm.
- Access to advertisers/sales execution – which has become the gating issue, and there are lots of good sales people who have a spike with advertisers in a geography, demographic or vertical area who can now set up shop on their own.
Through your entrepreneurial lens, who and/or what models in the advertising tech world is taking advantage of this valley in the economy right now? Any predictions on ad tech models that get funding in the next year or two?
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, venture capital
Posted in Ad Networks | 4 Comments »
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Google’s DoubleClick announced its new vertical network solution – DoubleClick Network Builder – for large publishers who are using Dart For Publishers (DFP) and looking to juice revenues, leverage their brand name and harness the Long Tail.
The “Help” section gives us the lowdown on the new GOOG tool:
“In addition to providing network users with the tools to create and maintain their own networks, DNB (DoubleClick Network Builder) also contains a portal for you as a partner to add and maintain your own information for sites within the network. The Partner Portal feature enables partners belonging to a network to maintain their own users, manage their ad slots, and view reports detailing both the performance and financial data for their sites.”
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Tags: ad exchanges, adsense, adwords, doubleclick, google, vertical ad network
Posted in Ad Networks | 2 Comments »
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Nathaniel Turner is Co-Founder, President & COO of Invite Media.
AdExchanger.com: What is Invite Media and how did it begin?
NT: Invite has built what we call a “universal buying platform,” Bid Manager. In one sentence, Bid Manager allows an agency, ad network or media buyer to automatically buy and manage display media across multiple ad exchanges through one interface. We’ve integrated with all the usual suspects, including Yahoo / Right Media, Google / DoubleClick, and real-time ad exchanges such as AppNexus (and more coming). I can’t get into a lot of the secret sauce of what we do or how some of our customers use the platform, but we feel that Bid Manager is really pushing the envelope with how display will be traded.
Invite got its start after one of my co-founders and I worked at VideoEgg for a summer, which gave us a crash-course in digital advertising (albeit video in that circumstance). Long story short, like typical college students we thought of an idea or two that wasn’t protectable passed 6 months, and then constantly morphed the idea into what it is today. Honestly though, we can’t take much credit for the idea transformation, as we surrounded ourselves with some tremendous investors and advisors who believed in us and gave us a ton of their time and feedback. Without them we’d probably be pitching small local businesses on online video ads right now.
How is the beta progressing? Projected launch data? Any performance metrics you can share?
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Tags: ad agency, ad exchanges, invite media, media buying, media math
Posted in Online Advertising | No Comments »
Monday, April 20th, 2009
Nathaniel Turner is Co-Founder, President & COO of Invite Media.
AdExchanger.com: What is Invite Media and how did it begin?
NT: Invite has built what we call a “universal buying platform,” Bid Manager. In one sentence, Bid Manager allows an agency, ad network or media buyer to automatically buy and manage display media across multiple ad exchanges through one interface. We’ve integrated with all the usual suspects, including Yahoo / Right Media, Google / DoubleClick, and real-time ad exchanges such as AppNexus (and more coming). I can’t get into a lot of the secret sauce of what we do or how some of our customers use the platform, but we feel that Bid Manager is really pushing the envelope with how display will be traded.
Invite got its start after one of my co-founders and I worked at VideoEgg for a summer, which gave us a crash-course in digital advertising (albeit video in that circumstance). Long story short, like typical college students we thought of an idea or two that wasn’t protectable passed 6 months, and then constantly morphed the idea into what it is today. Honestly though, we can’t take much credit for the idea transformation, as we surrounded ourselves with some tremendous investors and advisors who believed in us and gave us a ton of their time and feedback. Without them we’d probably be pitching small local businesses on online video ads right now.
How is the beta progressing? Projected launch data? Any performance metrics you can share?
(more…)
Tags: ad agency, ad exchanges, invite media, media buying, media math
Posted in Online Advertising | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Those crazy yield optimizers are at it again!
Or, are they really ad exchanges waiting in the tall grass?
First up, Yield Build. The company led by CEO Paul Edmondson has launched a new premium text ad network for publishers that optimizes Google AdSense ads in combination with somewhat exclusive Microsoft PubCenter ads and produces a yield improvement of 100% to AdSense alone according to a TechCrunch article. The Yield Build blog confirms the performance improvement and adds, “In addition to performing well, the ads are attractive and demonstrate excellent contextual breadth.” The ads evidently optimize according to ad layout, style, and network and take about 100,000 impressions to get the hamster peddling properly.
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Tags: ad exchanges, admeld, openx, pubmatic, rubicon project, Yield Optimization, yieldex
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Jarvis Coffin is the CEO of Burst Media.
AdExchanger.com: What must ad networks do, if anything, to make sure that publishers do not feel like they’re inventory is being cannibalized?
JC: Ad networks need to decide that the publisher is the customer and then do business with them on that basis. That means a relationship predicated on full transparency with regards to the price of inventory sold on publisher web sites and knowledge in advance of the sales efforts the network will conduct on behalf of the publisher.
Or, networks can decide they work for the advertiser, in which case they are simply media buying agencies, which will do wonders to mollify publishers (but may excite other agencies).
We blogged on this recently.
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Tags: burst media
Posted in Ad Networks | No Comments »
Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Jarvis Coffin is the CEO of Burst Media.
AdExchanger.com: What must ad networks do, if anything, to make sure that publishers do not feel like they’re inventory is being cannibalized?
JC: Ad networks need to decide that the publisher is the customer and then do business with them on that basis. That means a relationship predicated on full transparency with regards to the price of inventory sold on publisher web sites and knowledge in advance of the sales efforts the network will conduct on behalf of the publisher.
Or, networks can decide they work for the advertiser, in which case they are simply media buying agencies, which will do wonders to mollify publishers (but may excite other agencies).
We blogged on this recently.
(more…)
Tags: burst media
Posted in Ad Networks | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
The economy is in the gutter. CPMs are diving. OPA is pissed. IAB hates technology. Other acronyms are grumbling. It’s over!
But, wait. Collective Media and its CEO, Joe Apprendi, just enjoyed an impressive raise of $20 million courtesy of Accel Partners and iNovia Capital. Ch-ching. Looks like someone sees value in ad networks in spite of the drone of recent criticism which says otherwise.
According to MediaPost, investors were impressed:
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Tags: Ad Networks, collective media, contextual
Posted in Ad Networks | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Ken Barbieri
is Vice-President of Business Development at
LucidMedia Networks, Inc. and is responsible for developing and growing strategic partnerships with online publishers, advertising networks and advertising exchanges at LucidMedia.
AdExchanger.com: How’s business for LucidMedia? Any momentum you can report?
KB: At LucidMedia we are having a record year for revenue growth and client acquisition. And our momentum has been increasing rapidly this quarter. Much of this is due to the launch of our Verified Inventory Platform (VIP) that provides deep data insights to performance and brand safety online through our agency partners. Advertiser response has been incredible especially after initial tests proved the returns are there. We also recently won an OnMedia Technology Innovator award.
What trends are you seeing in online display advertising?
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, contextual, lucid media
Posted in Online Advertising | No Comments »
Monday, April 13th, 2009
Nathan Woodman is the Managing Director of Adnetik, Havas’ Digital Trading Network.
AdExchanger.com: Adnetik was described in a MediaPost article recently as “a trading system which is shifting the power of online audience aggregation back to advertisers and agencies from third-party intermediaries like online advertising networks, and exchanges.” Care to add anything?
NW: I don’t like phrasing the movement as a shift of power, rather a shift of control. Adnetik and Havas Digital will continue to buy both media and data from many ad networks. However, we would like to see pricing and optimization driven by the advertiser rather than the yield of the publisher. We also honestly feel that this approach will benefit both the advertiser and the publisher. It will result in both higher ROI for the advertiser and in turn higher eCPMs for the publisher.
So, is Adnetik trying to become its own ad exchange or network?
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, advertising, marketing
Posted in Agencies | No Comments »