Archive for July, 2009
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Web Trends Eats WideMile For Its Insights
Analytics provider, WebTrends, has bought multi-variate testing and site optimization company, WideMile for an unknown sum. Release here. Analytics companies are broadening their tool set to discover actionable, consumer insights for their clients.
A blog post just three days ago from WideMile gives an example by referencing a campaign that was part of the Open Exchange Partner group initiative which includes WebTrends ACR Analytics, ExactTarget, ForeSee Results, Mullen, Voce Communications and Widemile. (This could also be another way the public can be informed about the inner-workings of online marketing and that it is not scary.)
Forbes Media Goes Cross Media
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Tags: ad exchange, advertising, Analytics, microsoft, webtrends, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Gary Strauss is National Digital Sales Manager of Sporting News.
Is it frustrating having a great brand, but needing to compete against much larger sites such as ESPN and CBS Sportsline? What does Sporting News do to entice advertisers who can get much better scale elsewhere?
GS: No I would not categorize it as frustrating. Challenging, yes, but we really do not see espn.com as a direct competitor. Both CBS and ESPN have strengths as do we. Our strengths are audience engagement and great content specifically about six main sports –baseball, football and basketball (college and pro), hockey, golf and Nascar. We can and indeed do complement the vey large sports sites. Often we stand out on our own due to a great composition story and the ability to integrate, customize and make a creative statement for a client; all at a reasonable cost investment. We are not a reach vehicle but there are marketers out there who do not necessarily want only reach, rather they also want people’s attention. That is a real viable asset for Sporting News.
Do you think using yield management platforms such as AdMeld, Rubicon Project, AdMeld, PubMatic and others offer a viable option for publishers? How does SportingNews.com manage yield?
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Tags: admeld, advertising, publisher, Sporting News, Yield Optimization
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Another privacy piece on the behavioral ad network business has been launched – this time by The New York Times’ Stephanie Clifford. In her piece entitled, “Ads Follow Web Users, and Get Deeply Personal,” web ads are considered “Orwellian.” Good god. That’s over the top and reminiscent of other recent pieces in the media (like here).
There remains a significant need to explain PII and what anonymous cookie tracking is, and the Chinese Wall between them – and that the sky is not falling on consumers.
Are we going to start “outing” restaurants and gas stations for taking credit cards? I mean what goes on behind the counter, anyway? Aren’t they handling even more potentially threatening, “Orwellian” information? Is the world supposed to be an open and transparent barter system in the eyes of privacy advocates?
- “Here’s my sack of wheat. I’d like to buy a laptop, please.”
- “Sir, we don’t offer laptops. We offer the parts. You wouldn’t be able to see inside the laptop after all. We could have a Lo-Jack in there or something.”
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, advertising, behavioral targeting, marketing, privacy
Posted in Data | No Comments »
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Digital GRPs for Brand Marketers
Comscore and Microsoft announced today that they are “develop[ing] a digital media planning solution, named the Reach and Frequency Planner (RF Planner), which will allow brand advertisers to predict reach, frequency and audience composition at the ad placement level.” Is this the move toward GRPs that Comscore and Microsoft have been talking about separately in the blogosphere, lately? (Chairman Gian Fulgoni on the Comscore blog. Microsoft’s Young Bean Soft on the Microsoft Advertising blog.). Diabolical! Nevertheless, a solution that makes brand marketers more comfortable with digital purchases and mirrors a traditional system might work in bringing the almighty brand dollar online. The release notes, “The RF Planner will generate a series of optimized digital media plans that forecast target reach, frequency and gross rating points (GRPs) at the ad placement level.”
The Secondary Channel Cometh
Rob Beeler of AdMonsters discusses strategy for monetizing inventory which includes developing a secondary channel of inventory beyond the proverbial “premium” and “remnant.” Read more. With AdMonsters upcoming conference in Portland, this subject will likely be important for attending publishers.
Acerno Meets Akamai’s Ecommerce Clients
Akamai reported Q2 2009 earnings yesterday. Though profit was up, shares fell. A common Wall Street theme as good news is never good enough to overcome market expectations.
Acerno, the behavioral ad network purchased late last year by Akamai, was discussed several times on the conference call with analysts yesterday. In Q4 of 2008, Acerno drove 1/2 of a sequential increase in revenue. According to CFO J.D. Sherman, the Acerno momentum is expected to continue as Akamai leverages Acerno with its Ecommmere clients. From the Seeking Alpha call transcript:
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Tags: ad exchange, Ad Networks, comscore, media buying, microsoft, planning, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
Paul Edmondson is CEO of YieldBuild, a yield optimization company.
AdExchanger.com: Please describe the momentum you’re seeing at YieldBuild. For example, how many participating publishers are a part of your optimization offering these days?
We’re really happy with our growing publisher base. While we want to respect our publishers’ privacy, we can say that we have thousands of publishers, from very large social network and content sites to small blogs.
What is your target publisher market? Can any publisher participate?
Any site that meets our supported ad networks’ guidelines can begin optimizing their ads the first day with YieldBuild. Since we have special strength in optimizing contextual ads, our sweet spot is with content-rich sites that get a good portion of their traffic from search. However, a lot of direct-traffic sites have also seen impressive revenue gains using YieldBuild.
Do you consider your company’s model full-service or self-service?
We operate completely under a self-service model. A publisher can provision an account and begin optimization in less than a half hour.
How does Microsoft AdCenter’s Publisher text ad network compare to Google’s AdSense? Data points would be payout, contextual match, customization capabilities, etc.
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Tags: ad exchange, Ad Networks, advertising, marketing, Publishers, Yield Optimization, yieldbuild
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
Paul Martino is CEO of Aggregate Knowledge, a buy-side optimization platform.
AdExchanger.com: What does the new Aggregate Knowledge (AK) Audience Discovery Platform do for advertisers and agencies that they can’t do today?
AK’s Audience Discovery Platform delivers real-time, simultaneous optimization of inventory, audience, and creative. Inventory is optimized by determining which individual sites, ad networks, and exchange buys perform best against campaign objectives. Audience is optimized by determining key attributes of the best performing audiences (whether demographic, psychographic, behavioral, etc) and only buying or retaining impressions from those people. Finally, creative is optimized by leveraging AK’s personalization technology to customize the message to each user. Prior to AK’s Audience Discovery Platform, awkwardly fitting point technologies were available that could only optimize within their own silos. Our unified approach leads to significantly better results and deeper insights.
AK makes it easy for our customers to get started using our Audience Discovery Platform. Today, we are announced three Audience Discovery Platform products:
- AK Audience Insights™ reveals off-target impressions from each inventory provider.
- AK Audience Validation™ eliminates waste by rejecting off-target impressions in real time.
- AK Audience Optimization™ delivers real-time campaign optimization via attitudinal, click, or conversion metrics derived from a deep understanding of the best performing impressions.
Are Aggregate Knowledge products full-service or self-service? What’s the revenue model?
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Tags: aggregate knowledge, buying platform, demand-side platforms, media buying, Online Advertising
Posted in platforms | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Search Retargeting Just Got Bigger
Details on the forever imminent “Microsoft/Yahoo search deal” should happen today and AdAge claims that Yahoo! will run search ad sales for both companies. Also of note, according to AdAge’s Michael Learmonth, Yahoo!’s search retargeting product will now incorporate Microsoft data as well and gives the partnership a significant leg up over Google as Yahoo/MSFT can use search profiles to unlock value in display.
Read the Microsoft release on the new deal.
Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, tells Pete Carey of San Jose Mercury News that he thinks the new deal is no big thing. Carey writes:
“The deal ultimately will not be significant for either Yahoo or Microsoft, nor would it change the search industry’s structure, which he described as being divided into two categories: ‘Google and others.’”
Greg Linden (formerly of Amazon and Microsoft) on his Geeking With Greg blog thinks Google can “fix” advertising:
Fixing advertising not only would be lucrative, but also it directly fits into Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” At their best, ads provide useful information about interesting products and services. Right now, most contextual and display advertisements are more annoying than useful. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Will the Google ad exchange strategy be an important step in this direction? It should.
Interpublic Group Says “I Profited Grossly”
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Tags: display ads, media buying, microsoft, search, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Konrad Feldman is CEO of Quantcast, an online advertising solutions company.
AdExchanger.com: Overall, what industry-wide trends are you seeing across your product lines in 2009?
KF: From our vantage point we are seeing tremendous energy by brand advertisers and their publishing partners to unlock the value of real-time audiences. At the end of the day, brand marketers want to reach their customers and prospects at scale – with limited waste. If publishers can deliver against that objective, they can drive their own revenue yield, and expand their advertising base. It’s potentially a win-win for the marketplace, but it requires some fundamental shifts in how we operate.
Digital media distribution creates opportunities and challenges: consumption is increasingly fragmented and impression delivery is allocated dynamically, but there is no market-wide solution to deliver advertising against audiences in real time. The result has been a brand-based online ad model grounded in total impression – not audience – delivery. It’s hard to know what actual audience is bought/delivered when the yardstick for evaluation (historical property-based audiences) is completely disconnected from the delivery model (real-time impressions). Just because you “buy” a million impressions on a site with a historically high male skew doesn’t mean the impressions you have delivered in real-time are actually the men.
We’re excited by the rate of adoption of the products we’ve launched in 2009. Quantcast Marketer helps agencies and advertisers understand the distinctive characteristics of their best audiences and Quantcast Media Program allows buyers and sellers to execute addressable media buys using these audience definitions as a consistent yardstick for impression selection and delivery. These products just launched in Q2 and we’re already seeing significant active participation from leading players on both the buy and sell side of our industry.
In AdAge you said that your new Media Program “allows marketers to define their customers … rather than a media entity making that package or translation for them.” I believe you’re referring to behavioral ad networks and publishers here. Can you elaborate on what is getting lost in the translation and how Quantcast improves it?
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Tags: ad exchanges, buying platform, media buying, Quantcast
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
TV Needs To Sell In Real-Time
The Wall Street Journal’s Suzanne Vranica and Sam Schechner are reporting that the TV upfront for the four big networks is going to crater a whopping 10-15% – at least – as buyers like HP (quoted for the article) decide to take their chances and buy just-in-time so that they “have some flexibility in these uncertain times.” Yeah, right. It could be even cheaper by then.
As audience becomes scalable on digital TV and addressable media a reality, look for real-time buying to stem the network’s decreasing CPMs as well as dwindling upfront prospects.
If advertisers really know what they’re buying with quantifiable ROI (cost per whatever as David Smith, would say), they’ll be more willing to risk in an upfront or futures market. Liquidity in an open auction for addressable audiences will drive prices up in the spot (or scatter) market and encourage buyers to lock down rates upfront. Right now, all advertisers know is that rates are going down for an audience that is, by and large “a guess,” compared to the revelatory power of digital and its data-infused DNA. If they’re more confident with a real-time system, they’ll be more willing to risk in a futures/upfront market.
Google And Visible World Addressing TV
A new partnership will allow Google to use Visible World’s software to target and place ads on behalf of clients for its automated Google TV ads product. Considering Google’s interest in cross-channel digital advertising, the announcement makes sense. Visible World’s investors such as WPP and Viacom are placing a financial and strategic bet that the addressable TV market is about to take off. Read more on PaidContent.org.
Polling On Ads
Two new polls are out from the combined efforts of LinkedIn Research Network/Harris Interactive. The first titled, “Advertisers and Audiences: How Their Views on Advertising Effectiveness Differ” (PDF) showed among other findings:
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Tags: ad exchanges, addressable media, media buying, Online Advertising, polls, real-time bidding, Research
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Monday, July 27th, 2009
Scott Knoll is SVP of Display Media for Datran Media, a digital marketing technology company.
AdExchanger.com: What trends is Datran Media seeing from its digital media clients in 2009?
SK: Datran Media monitors and reports on trends across media clients and advertisers, including responses to our annual industry survey. One of the biggest trends we have seen this year is the need for campaign-based measurement. Media clients have understood the importance of targeting for a while, but now they are demanding ways to measure and verify targeted audiences on a campaign by campaign basis. Rather than just knowing the number of unique users and click rates, marketers need insights into the makeup of their audience and responders. This becomes increasingly important as marketers shift from targeting specific sites to targeting users on exchanges based on recent behaviors, characteristics or third party data.
Can you describe momentum for Datran Media this year?
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, buying platforms, Datran Media, media buying
Posted in Data | No Comments »
Monday, July 27th, 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 technology company.
To my frustration, talking about proprietary vs. open software standards is a really good way to get eyes to glaze over in the ad business.
Nevertheless, in this post I am going to try and explain why real-time bidding (RTB) is truly an open software standard – and why “open” is a really, really, really big deal for all of us.
The best definition of a software standard that I can find is on Wikipedia:
“[A] Software standard essentially is a certain agreed to terms, concepts and techniques by software creators so that many different software can understand each other”
Now, let’s break it down further and relate it to online ads.
There are two types of standards: proprietary and open. A proprietary standard is a standard that is owned and controlled by a company or a group of companies who can restrict, change, charge for use, or do whatever they want with it. A good example of this in the ad business is the Adwords APIs that enable search advertisers to build software for buying Google search ads.
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, Agencies, real-time bidding, rtb, software, standards, triggit
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | No Comments »
Monday, July 27th, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up…
Networking and Behaving This Week
Hello Left Coast!
More conferences this week for digital advertising enthusiasts as OMMA Ad Nets is in Los Angeles on Tuesday and OMMA Behavioral is in San Francisco on Thursday. The Right Media blog pipes up for the West Coast, “Most of the conferences tend to be in New York City because that’s where the agencies are, and although it’s great to get to New York, sometimes it’s nice to go to something around the corner.” Look, bottom line, it’s nice to let you people have a conference once in a while.
ValueClick Takes It On Its Wall Street Chin
Benchmark Capital downgraded ValueClick Media to a “sell” even though it has yet to report its Q2 2009 earnings (Due August 4). StreetInsider.com noted on Friday, “Benchmark said ValueClick’s three largest segments Media, Comparison Shopping and Affiliate Marketing each could decline by mid-teens percentages in 2009.”
In other ValueClick news, their technology division known as Mediaplex, announced that its MOJO ad server has turned 10 years old. Happy birthday. Read the release.
Compressing The Funnel
Adgregate Markets (Q&A) and Linkstorm announced a partnership which will bring Adgregate’s in-banner eCommerce system to Linkstorm’s rich media banner offering called “Banner Xpander.” Read the release. Adgregate Markets effectively attempts to compress the purchase funnel by creating awareness and offering fulfillment all in a single, display ad unit. Direct response (DR) advertisers – such as those who are Linkstorm clients – would appear to be a good fit.
Hespos Warns Agencies on Arbitrage
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchange, Ad Networks, arbitrage, Digital Out-Of-Home, DOOH
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Friday, July 24th, 2009
More earnings reports – ch-ching?
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer stepped up to the Microsoft Fiscal 4Q 2009 earnings microphone (see the release) and although he didn’t have a lot to say about advertising on the call – they’ve got a lotta stuff going on over there at MSFT – a few nuggets did slip out in the form of Slide 14 in their Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation (Download PPT).
On the call, Ballmer delivered the news on display and it wasn’t pretty. From Seeking Alpha:
“Moving on to the online services business, revenue declined 13%. Online advertising revenue was down 14%, mainly due to the significant decline in display advertising rates across the industry. Partially offsetting this was continued growth in page views.”
Well, maybe it will get better later in the year. Are things that bad, Steve?
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Tags: Ad Networks, adecn, Agencies, holding companies, hyperlocal, microsoft, new york times, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Friday, July 24th, 2009
Philip Smolin, General Manager, Platform Solutions at Turn discusses yesterday’s announcement regarding their new, white-label buying platform solutions.
AdExchanger.com: How do you differentiate with other solutions in the marketplace such as MediaMath and Invite Media?
PS: Turn is best-in-class for custom audience targeting, optimization and analytics. A number of vendors are providing basic exchange management solutions, and certainly Turn’s platform provides all of the core features you would expect: a unified dashboard for managing all ad exchanges and yield managers, centralized retargeting and behavioral buys, universal frequency caps, transparent reporting, etc. But where Turn really excels is in the ability to help media buyers go beyond traditional retargeting and behavioral targeting to actually discover and convert entirely NEW audience segments they haven’t previously reached.
Some of the differentiated technologies driving Turn’s platform include real-time behavioral data assimilation and modeling; predictive bid optimization that blends user, site and page context information; and direct, real-time bidded (RTB) exchange integration. The end result is an extremely powerful audience targeting and optimization platform that is still surprisingly easy for the media buyer to use. The final component is an advanced analytics system that goes beyond basic performance reporting to include deep demographic and behavioral insights.
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Tags: ad agencies, ad network, buying platform, rtb, turn
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
Scott Portugal is SVP, Global Business Development at TRAFFIQ, an online advertising marketplace.
AdExchanger.com: Discuss the momentum for TRAFFIQ in 2009. What’s going on right now?
SP: What isn’t going on! Obviously, the announcement yesterday of our strategic partnership with Havas Digital is big news. We’re extraordinarily excited about the chance to work with an agency of their caliber. It’s also another validation of our belief that the market and the industry are in need of a company like TRAFFIQ now. Organizing the mid-tail and premium display advertising space – and facilitating transactions between those buyers & sellers – is something that needs to be addressed, and it’s telling of Havas’ forward thinking that they see an opportunity to have us help them address this challenge.
The Long Tail has been adequately addressed by all the names we know: Right Media, AdBrite, AdECN. Even publishers own long tails have been addressed: AOL has AdBidCentral in addition to Ad.com; Yahoo! has RightMedia; MSNBC has their AdReady-enabled system. But for agencies & advertisers trying to parse through 1000s of clean, well-lit sites ranging from premium category leaders to niche enthusiast sites, very little has changed over time: it’s still very siloed and inefficient.
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, marketplace, media buying, platform, traffiq
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009
Turn has announced today that it will offer a white label version of its buying platform to agencies and advertisers. (Read the release.) Previously known as a network and exchange, Turn will now let buyers buy media from the same sources that Turn-the-network does for its clients with its Exchange Trading Desk product. In addition, it will offer a full-strength version of its platform (called “Private Network”) to agencies who are looking to buy beyond the Turn inventory pool such as direct publisher relationships or other networks or exchanges. For example, taking a look at TRAFFIQ’s announcement early this week with Havas, Havas Digital could license (hypothetically) Turn’s Private Network product and then use it to buy TRAFFIQ inventory as well.
Redwood City, CA-based, Turn joins a rapidly-expanding field of buying platforms that includes Invite Media (Q&A), MediaMath (Q&A), [x+1] (Q&A), AdBuyer.com (Q&A) and CPM Advisors (Q&A) to name a few.
It’s shaping up to be quite a race.
Google Exchange Plans EXPOSED!
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Tags: ad exchanges, ad network, adbuyer.com, cpmatic, google, invite media, media math, pubmatic, turn
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Kum Bay Yah, Muh Lord. Kum Bay Yah.
Congrats to the IAB on their lunch and learn event, “An Out of the Box Lunch with AdMeld, PubMatic, The Rubicon Project and YieldBuild,” in NYC last Thursday. It was a study in how players in the advertising space – in this case, yield optimizers – can work together in order to enhance each other’s value.
Optimizing Lunch
Attendees were from a broad cross-section of ad networks and publishers – large and small. And, everyone in the room wanted one question answered, “How do I make more money?”
The yield optimizers answered.
In part, the optimizers in-person presentation included a basic how-to on yield optimization. We won’t cover that segment of the presentation at the IAB’s request. Needless to say, optimizing yield at scale is an imposing barrier requiring serious tech and smarts – something each of these companies have aggregated in driving publisher adoption and demand-side interest.
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Tags: ad agencies, Ad Networks, advertising, marketing, Yield Optimization
Posted in Yield Management Tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
Yahoo!’s earnings are out! (PDF)
So, what happened to display? It’s a mixed bag – yet relatively positive considering the economy and current state of oversupply of display ad inventory on the Web.
From Seeking Alpha’s call transcript:
“Worldwide O&O display revenue declined 14% to $393 million. U.S. display declined 11% which was slightly better than first quarter’s decline. International declined 20% on a reported basis, but only 5% on a constant currency basis.
Non-guaranteed display revenue continued to grow strongly which partially offset the year-over-year decline on the guaranteed side. However, on a sequential basis guaranteed display revenue increased. Our sell through rate for guaranteed inventory improved in 2Q based on strong demand from large advertisers. This is an encouraging sign but we remain cautious about the economic environment generally.”
Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz said that $75 million in Q3 would be invested in improving and building out the company’s display and search ad platforms with marketing spend to follow in Q4 and next year.
Merrill Lynch’s Imran Khan noted the improvement in guaranteed display and asked for more detail on it and non-reserved inventory quarter-over-quarter from Yahoo! CFO Tim Morse who said:
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Tags: Ad Networks, display advertising, doubleclick ad exchange, right media exchange, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
Chris Hulse is CEO of Inflection Point Media, a business-to-business ad network.
Any current trends that you can share in Inflection Point Media’s B2B ad network business – strengths, weaknesses? And, have publisher CPMs cratered like they have in the B2C world?
Inflection Point Media’s complete focus on the SMB market has been our strength. In a recession, marketers are looking for efficient ways to put the right message in front of the right prospect at exactly the right time. That’s what we do at IPM. We do this by networking over 140, highly focused SMB sites and search engines. We are able to identify key “inflection points” by the type of keyword search or targeted browsing an SMB does on these sites. By valuing the audience and monetizing it off site, we generate incremental revenue for our publishers in a non-cannibalizing way.
Publishers are struggling right now. Downward pressure on CPMs in a recession is a fact of life, though the B2B vertical is a bit more buoyant than the more general B2C world. Publishers that have great content, provide real value to their users and have tight control over their own inventory will always do best in down times. We see that first hand with the publishers we work with. It’s tough out there and that’s why we believe we launched our company at exactly the right time.
For publishers, how do you increase their revenues without cannibalizing sales? Isn’t channel conflict inevitable?
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Tags: ad exchange, ad network, Ad Networks, Agencies, inflection point media, media buying
Posted in Ad Networks | No Comments »
