Archive for August, 2009
Monday, August 31st, 2009
Mark Redgrave is Founder & CEO of OpenAmplify, an online advertising technology company.
AdExchanger.com: How did your experience at an agency (HHCL Group in London) prepare you for running OpenAmplify?
MR: I was lucky to work under some really brilliant client services and creative teams on some of the world’s most important brands. I learned to listen. I learned how to think strategically and tactically. I learned how to engage with people and how to focus on the end-game. All very useful skills when you are running your own business.
Who is OpenAmplify’s target market? And, please describe your revenue model? Any plans for a white label version?
OpenAmplify packages $15M of patented Natural Language Processing technology into one beautifully simple API. We deliberately created OpenAmplify as an open web platform as its potential applications are huge and we wanted to make our technology accessible, efficient and usable. Today, many of our customers, partners and users are in the digital media space. We have publishers, ad networks, agencies and brands all using OpenAmplify to better understand content that’s being created on the web. In the near future, we will no doubt see OpenAmplify used in the search, CRM, homeland security and mobile markets, to name just a few. In all instances, the basic revenue model is the same: we charge per transaction and the cost of those transactions depends on the required speed and depth of the analysis you require.
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, Ad Networks, contextual, media buying, openamplify, semantic
Posted in Online Advertising | No Comments »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
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RTB at Yahoo!’s RightMedia
Right Media’s Senior Manager of Professional Services, Pedro Ponce de Leon, announced on Thursday from the Right Media blog, that the Yahoo! exchange has real-time bidding and that “using Right Media’s predictive algorithms is the best path to take, as it’s in real time and is dynamic. You won’t need to make large capital expenditures to build out the capabilities needed to participate in real-time bidding.” With the Right Media exchange model, APIs appear to be a critical element. AdExchanger.com looks forward to learning more about Yahoo! and RightMedia’s exchange plans in the very near future. Stay tuned!
Was Yahoo!, Now Microsoft
Qi Lu, who became president of Microsoft’s online services division last December, is profiled in the today’s New York Times by Miguel Helft. Prior to Microsoft, Lu helped drive engineering for Yahoo!’s search and internet advertising technology initiatives where he was known for a maniacal work ethic which includes 4 miles of running on a treadmill at 4 a.m. Read more.
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Tags: ad agency, demand-side platforms, DSP, media buying, mediamath
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
Eyal Goldwerger, CEO of TargetSpot, an Internet radio advertising network.
AdExchanger.com: What momentum has TargetSpot seen in 2009 for itself as well as its clients?
2009 is going to be a year of accelerating growth at TargetSpot, driven by rising advertiser demand. This is a result of both an increase in our advertisers’ budgets, as well as a much wider mix in our advertiser base. Our customers now include a more complete spectrum, from the very largest national brands running national network campaigns, to national spot campaigns, and through to the small, locally-focused advertisers. Our customers are also using our network in an equally diverse manner: a recent outreach campaign enabled us to double the number of “self service” advertiser sign ups, which complements the growth in our large advertiser and agency-driven business that is predominantly “full-service” based.
Do you consider TargetSpot a technology or a services company?
TargetSpot is a service company which is enabled by great technology. As an advertising network, we enable the advertiser to tap into an immense amount of consolidated inventory and efficiently place ads across the network based on accurate targeting criteria. They benefit from scale, diversity, targeting, and automation. And we provide our integrated distribution partners access to advertiser demand that is consolidated and aggregate through our network. Ads are automatically placed within their streams, with similar benefits from their end.
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, Ad Networks, media buying, TargetSpot
Posted in Digital Audio and Radio | No Comments »
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
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AdSense Thru DoubleClick’s Ad Exchange!
It’s official! Well, almost. The AdSense blog announced late Tuesday that ad networks will now be buying AdSense inventory through an open auction. That can only mean one thing: Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange – AdEx 2.0 – lives.
From the AdSense blog:
“We’re pleased to announce plans to give you the ability to allow multiple Google-certified ad networks to compete for display ad space on your site.”
There’s more: “You’ll have control over which networks can show ads on your pages — you can choose to opt out of receiving ads from specific networks, or all networks completely.”
When you ask? “We’ll slowly begin allowing ads from Google-certified ad networks to appear on AdSense pages over the coming months, so you won’t see an immediate impact on your ads or earnings. As new networks are certified, you’ll see them appear in your account.”
With Google’s plentiful supply of inventory, publishers should be excited by this development as any competitive auction is good for their bottom line. In the coming months, it will be interesting to hear any feedback since AdSense is often at the end of the daisy chain. There’s no way around it: this is the exchange model helping publishers.
Many details on how this will work for AdSense publishers through the Exchange are also available in the evolving DoubleClick Ad Exchange 2.0 Help Section:
“When Ad Exchange is used to display AdWords ads, in addition to the policies outlined above, sellers must comply with the AdSense Program Policies on all pages that display AdWords ads, wherein ’seller’ is referred to as ‘publisher’.”
Need more? View the video:
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Tags: ad exchange, adex, AdEx 2.0, doubleclick, google ad exchange, rubicon project, varick media
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
John Vincent is CEO of EyeWonder, an online advertising technology company.
AdExchanger.com: How would you like to see standards evolve for in-stream video ad inventory? And in-page video ad inventory?
JV: Standardization is still a work in progress for the in-stream industry, so at this point we’d really like to see more of it in place. The IAB’s Digital Video Committee has made a great start by releasing its Digital Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) and Video Player-Ad Interface Definitions (VPAID) guidelines. VAST standardizes communication protocol between video players and ad servers while VPAID defines a method for video ads to communicate with video players, enabling ad compatibility across all VPAID-compliant players. Perhaps in the future standards could address how to handle sequencing and scheduling within players as well as develop standard video screen sizes.
Can you see in-stream video ad inventory available through an ad exchange model someday soon? What are the complexities?
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Tags: ad exchanges, advertising, Creative, eyewonder, marketing, media buying
Posted in Creative | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
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We Have A Winner
The advertising industry may have finally found an able spokesperson in the human form of Berin Szoka, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Internet Freedom at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. (The title alone is impressive!)
Szoka, in an interview with BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol on MediaPost, explains his views supporting user empowerment rather than government-instituted solutions for online privacy. The MediaPost article is just the beginning as Szoka’s argument spills over to the article’s comments and then on to the Technical Liberation Front blog in a post from Szoka entitled, “Online Advertising: Privacy Zealot-Elitists v. Real Consumer Advocates.”
It’s impressive to see Tawakol get involved in this fight. Certainly, his company’s core business proposition – behavioral data – is at stake. Regardless, this was an informative give-and-take that can help bring light to the advertising industry’s argument that targeting based on cookies, data, etc., is actually providing a good outcome for consumers and business, alike.
New York City’s Ad Week Lineup Announced
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Tags: Ad Networks, display advertising, media buying, privacy, user empowerment
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
Calvin Lui is CEO and President of Tumri, a creative optimization technology company.
AdExchanger.com: What trends have you seen at Tumri in 2009? Can you characterize trends in revenue momentum, deal size, client verticals, consumer audience targets, etc.?
CL: Tumri has experienced tremendous growth and momentum in the last 18 months. While we are a private company and do not share specific revenue or performance figures, I can share that we are growing at a rate in the triple-digit percentages in just about any metric you can imagine: revenues, impressions served, campaigns run, clients served, etc. We have seen average deal size for us grow significantly as our dynamic, intelligent ad serving solution has been adopted in broader and deeper implementations amongst our client base of advertisers in the retail, travel, consumer electronics, packaged goods, financial services, telecom and entertainment verticals.
We have also seen a much broader adoption of the Tumri solution across much broader consumer advertising use cases. Whereas many people initially used Tumri’s AdPod for merchandising and remarketing campaigns, we are now seeing many advertisers leverage our dynamic platform for broad awareness campaigns, advanced remarketing executions (think extremely deep customer segmentations based not just on site visit, but also behavior related to specific category browse, purchase and non-purchase, recency, frequency and basket size, and more), and storyboarding/sequential messaging up and down the user acquisition funnel. These advanced executions have yielded amazing results. For instance, we have worked with HP for about a year now, leveraging a wide variety of marketing tactics with our AdPods. The results? Display campaigns with Tumri have yielded ROIs on par with search marketing campaigns, and the HP-Tumri campaigns have reached over 140 million US unique impressions. To do this effectively, our AdPods optimized over 20,000 unique creative recipes to various audience and media segments. In essence, we have been able to deliver for HP what many consider the Holy Grail of marketing: high performance ROI across broad audiences with the branding and visual impact of graphical display.
How does Tumri differentiate from competitors like Teracent?
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Tags: banner ad, creative optmization, demand-side platforms, DSPs, media buying, multi-variate testing, rtb, tumri
Posted in Creative | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
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PubMatic Hires
Peter Kafka of All Things D reports that Andrew Rutledge, who had been in charge of publisher sales for DoubleClick for the past year, has moved to yield optimizer, PubMatic, and assumed a similar role. (Read the release.) Josh Wetzel from eBay and Shopping.com also joined the PubMatic team as Vice President of Publisher Services.
In an interview with AdExchanger.com, Rutledge stated that he was drawn to PubMatic for a few reasons including its focus on premium publishers, technology and client feedback, and the opportunity ahead given his belief in the PubMatic product roadmap.
Rutledge adds that one of the key differences between his new role at PubMatic and his previous role at DoubleClick is that “DoubleClick’s value proposition and pricing model was primarily CPM driven. I really like PubMatic’s focus on the 2nd channel (non-guaranteed inventory), which is primarily driven by performance advertisers and ad networks who buy in different ways.”
Brand.net Expanding
Elizabeth Blair’s (AdExchanger.com Q&A) Brand.net is growing. In a press release, continued strength in CPG is providing momentum as Blair says, “Our average order continues to exceed $100,000, and the majority of our revenue continues to be repeat purchases by the top 100 U.S. advertisers.” Brand.net’s premium pitch appears to be working. To spread the word – and drive business – the Company added sales executives from Yahoo!, AOL and Time Warner as well as opened a Dallas office.
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Tags: ad exchange, ad network, brand.net, pubmatic, yahoo apt platform, Yield Optimization
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2009
George John is CEO of Rocket Fuel, Inc., an online advertising network.
AdExchanger.com: How do you see the role of the ad network evolving over the next 12-24 months? Will ad network arbitrage disappear?
It has been hyped that the ad network marketplace is overly crowded with more than 400 players. But when you take a closer look at the market in detail, of these supposed 400 networks, 370+ are small niche buyers and vertical content aggregators that act as basic service providers to make buying media a little easier for agencies and advertisers. The remaining 25 or so aren’t really data targeting companies but rather inventory aggregators who basically sell pre-defined profiles or “buckets” of impressions and call them customer “segments.” Many of the traditional players are only scalable through efficient operations, not technology. There are actually very few companies with real technology platforms and intelligent systems that help them make sophisticated and insightful targeting decisions in real time.
Because of the existing climate, over the next 12-24 months, we feel the ecosystem will go through rapid change and the data-inventory value creators (those that can make sense of and understand the value of all types of data online), not the content aggregators, will be the winners.
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Tags: ad exchange, Ad Networks, media buying, rocket fuel, RocketFuel
Posted in Ad Networks | No Comments »
Monday, August 24th, 2009
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Lookery Closes Its Doors
No more Lookery. CEO Scott Rafer announced from the Lookery blog that the Company is winding down operations. Rafer offers a post mortem of regrets and/or mis-steps that he believes, if avoided, could have led to a different conclusion such as, “We could have and should have used the proceeds of the convertible note (Lookery’s funding) to get out from under Facebook’s thumb rather to invest further in the Facebook Platform.” More from TechCrunch.
It should be interesting to see whatever is next from Scott Rafer and his fellow, former-Lookery, colleagues. At the very least, Lookery provided a whole lot o’ learning that should prepare them for the next idea(s) which could be very relevant to the digital advertising space.
IPOs Ready To Take-Off
RRE Ventures LLC’s Co-Founder James D. Robinson IV says that he has never seen so many VC-backed companies properly prepared for an IPO. Robinson tells The Deal that once the market improves a bit more, their should be a flood of strong IPOs.
NY Times Brings Roadblock Ads To Iphone
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchange, Ad Networks, Iphone, ipo, Quantcast, sir martin sorrell, WPP
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Friday, August 21st, 2009
Payam Zamani is CEO of Reply.com, a lead generation marketplace.
AdExchanger.com: Reply.com started in lead generation. Why did you transition the business into an exchange and marketplace?
PZ: Until the summer of 2006, Reply.com was focused on lead generation for the real estate and automotive markets. During that quarter, many of our largest real estate buyers informed us they were going to stop buying leads due to the slowdown in the market. We started discussing the tremendous innovation in paid search and display / traffic exchanges. However, lead generation had been around for over ten years and hadn’t evolved. The writing was on the wall: Lead Generation 1.0 was going to die and Lead Gen 2.0 would replace it. We had to rethink and revise our business model.
To give you some context, in a Lead Gen 1.0 model, a car dealer negotiates with a 3rd party lead provider for a fixed fee, price-per-lead, locked contract with no insight into lead quality. At the end of the month, some sources have a $300 cost of sale and some a $1,000, but lead quality at the time of purchase was unknown. If that dealership has too many cars on the lot, or is running a weekend special, there isn’t a way to segment and do more of what works and stop spending where it isn’t working. So more often than not, the dealership gets frustrated and quits the program.
We decided to protect our revenue base, but stopped growing it. Instead of continuing on an inefficient path, we went dark for 18 months. During that time, our engineering team built a lead exchange and marketplace. We formally launched in April of 2008; it has grown tremendously since.
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Tags: ad exchange, exchange, Lead Generation, marketplace, media buying, optimization, reply
Posted in Online Advertising | No Comments »
Friday, August 21st, 2009
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Jarvis Coffin Coming Soon To The OPA
Burst Media CEO, Jarvis Coffin (AdExchanger.com Q&A), is ready to prove wrong the recent, link-baiting-extraordinaire study funded by the Online Publishers Association (OPA). Coffin says he may begin calling on his fellow OPA “dues-payers” such as 24/7 Real Media, Collective Media, Tremor Media, Ad Meld, PubMatic and Rubicon Project to join a study that shows how ad networks help, not hurt, publishers. More on the Burst Media blog.
New Rankings from Comscore
Comscore released its ad network rankings for July and Advertising.com was once again on top. It should be noted that an ad network or exchange needs to subscribe (pay for) Comscore’s services to be included in the rankings.
Compared to March rankings, a few movers and shakers include Audience Science which improved its reach by 16 million U.S. uniques and Specific Media which is up 20 million uniques. And, Comscore says that the U.S. Internet population remained steady with 192 million uniques between July and April.
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, Ad Networks, media buying, opa, Wenda Millard
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
Rob Friedman is Co-founder and EVP of Digital Element.
AdExchanger.com: Can you layout the basic ways your clients are using Digital Element’s IP detection services?
RF: Digital Element’s customers use our IP Intelligence solutions in a variety of ways such as improving response and click-through rates through more accurate ad geotargeting; reducing advertiser variance issues by using an industry-standard technology; creating more impactful interactions with site visitors through content localization; creating communities—both online and off—by connecting visitors with similar interests in similar geographic regions; improving online marketing through audience geo-segmentation; offering geo-based content distribution with geographic rights management; and more.
In the online advertising space, the largest ad networks, servers, exchanges, and portals such as DoubleClick, ValueClick, The Rubicon Project, Microsoft Advertising, Facebook, Yahoo, Blue Kai, AOL and many others use our technology to deliver real-time, highly targeted and optimized ad messaging. Armed with Digital Element’s industry-standard technology, ads can be geotargeted down to a zip code or town level based solely on a visitor’s IP address. Furthermore, companies can target based on other IP Intelligence data factors including company name, domain, connection type, home or business user, and more. In a nutshell, Digital Element’s IP intelligence targeting data allows for increased ad relevance, which improves ROI and delivers more revenue for our ad customers.
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Tags: ad exchange, ad network, Digital Element, IP Discovery, marketing, media buying, Online Advertising
Posted in Online Advertising | No Comments »
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
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Betting on Display
Forbes magazine writer Quentin Hardy speaks with Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz about the recent Microsoft search deal as well as the Sunnyvale-based company’s new plans to concentrate on display advertising. Read the whole story.
U.S. Gov’t Reviews Yahoo!/Microsoft Deal
Kim Hart of The Hill is reporting that an initial review of the search deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft has been initiated by the Department of Justice. With dwindling search share for Yahoo! and Microsoft in comparison to Google, and no clear case for monopolistic practices, it’s hard to see this as anything more than a perfunctory process.
Disintermediating Media Buyers
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Tags: ad exchange, Ad Networks, adready, display advertising, google, mashable, microsoft, sociable ad creator, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
Yesterday’s sold-out, LeadsCon East convention in New York City brought together the lead generation community for a two-day event focused on, of course, generating leads as well as putting more tools in the hands of direct marketers.
Conference organizer, noted blogger and former super seller, Jay Weintraub gave attendees a healthy dose of the potential of display advertising as several panels brought together technology companies, platforms and data providers who revealed the value that they are adding to their part of the exchange ecosystem – and how they can serve marketers.
In a thought-provoking afternoon panel led by Rob Deichert, SVP of Publisher Ops & Yield Management at Platform-A/AOL Advertising, panelists discussed the demand-side platform evolution, key recent milestones and their meaning to marketers.
Antony Taylor, who is Director of Professional Services at Yahoo!’s Right Media, provided his perspective on exchanges today – and tomorrow:
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Tags: ad exchanges, appnexus, leadscon, right media, yahoo
Posted in Online Advertising | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
Jason Kates is Founder and CEO of Argo Digital Solutions, Inc. and rVue.com, a digital out-of-home advertising exchange.
AdExchanger.com: Can you give quantify the Digital Out-Of-Home (DOOH) reach for Argo’s rVue Exchange? Do you think of reach in terms of networks or stores or consumers who are estimated to see particular digital media in a given day?
The rVue search engine quantifies its reach in a number of ways based on the needs of the individual agencies and networks we work with. Currently, rVue has amassed over 100,000 screens and nearly 2,000,000 daily impressions concentrated within the top DMAs throughout the country.
Why call rVue an exchange and not a meta network? How does it offer transparency and control to advertisers and signage owners?
That is a great question. It is first important to note is that a driving force behind the creation of rVue was to aid an industry we strongly believe in. Digital Out of Home (DOOH) has faced challenges in the past which included industry fragmentation, difficulty efficiently delivering high quality content as well as exposure and connection to advertisers and agencies wanting to place media. rVue was developed by our highly experienced, tech savvy engineers partnered with our advertising and marketing team. They bring a powerful combination of engineers with in-depth experience managing complex DOOH networks and marketers with agency and media experience. The result is rVue – designed to ease the process of buying and managing DOOH.
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Tags: ad exchange, ad network, addressable media, Digital Out-Of-Home, DOOH, media buying
Posted in Digital Out-Of-Home | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
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The Vertical State of the Display Ad Market
In a piece by MediaWeek’s Mike Shields, Adify is reporting that display ad prices are rebounding and names categories such as Real Estate ($6.49 CPMs in Q2, was half that in Q4 2008) and Sports ($7.09 CPM in Q2, +18% from Q1). The highest CPM was in Travel at over $19. Shields notes that there was some weakness, too, in the “parents” and “beauty” verticals. Read more.
Baidu Opens New Ad System
Aaron Back and Loretta Chao of The Wall Street Journal cover the Chinese search engine, Baidu, and its new advertising system called Phoenix Nest. The new system makes it clear what is paid advertising and what isn’t – which is evidently something that even state-run television in China was complaining about. Learn more here.
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, adify, advertising, google ad exchange, marketing
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
Stephano Kim is President and Chief Operating Officer of x+1, an online buying platform and data company.
AdExchanger.com: A recent SEC filing shows that [x+1] has recently raised approximately $2 million. What will the new funds be used for? And, why a smaller raise like this as opposed to a larger raise or using debt?
SK: In short, we did a quick small raise to fund some very specific R&D efforts in new business lines where we could extend our platform. The current business doesn’t require any further capital and we have enough debt to manage our working capital day-to-day. As you know our platform is both data and channel agnostic and we think there is fertile ground in many markets where our platform could really drive a paradigm shift.
Tags: buying platform, display advertising, media buying, x+1
Posted in platforms | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
“the executioner” opinion expressed below is written by Sam Temes, Associate, Platform Management, Ad Exchanges, at Razorfish.
In the last few months, those of us working in the world of ad exchanges have been bombarded by articles and discussions about issues that will directly affect our careers: privacy regulation, data sources, emerging business models and so on. In the same time period, I’ve seen virtually no discussion about how exchanges may positively affect Internet experiences for everyday users like most of my friends and family.
Several years ago, ad networks and content ads turned blogs into businesses and gave large-scale publishers an outlet for excess inventory. Designers were encouraged to create as many impressions as possible. As a result, we all became used to seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of online ads every day and learned to ignore or block 99% of them. Now that the network model is disappearing, the user experience to which we’re accustomed will disappear as well. As advertisers and their agencies become fluent in the value of publisher assets (see The Value of the Ad Cow), publishers will be driven to redesign for only the most valuable assets, potentially making the Internet a more quiet and peaceful place.
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, advertising, marketing, media buying, razorfish
Posted in Agencies | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
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[x+1] Gets More Cash
[x + 1] (read CEO John Nardone’s AdExchanger.com Q&A here) has received $2 million in additional funding according to PaidContent.org’s Tameka Kee. SEC filing here.
kirshenbaum bond + partners Hires New CEO
Fresh on the heels of news that MDC Partners’ CEO Miles Nadal was looking to transition a couple of its high profile agencies into their next, respective phases, it was announced that kirshenbaum bond + partners has hired Lori Senecal to be its next CEO. (Read the release.) The agency will be rebranded “kirshenbaum bond senecal + partners.” Senecal was President of McCann Erickson’s New York office prior to accepting the kbp position. (source: @ddoft)
FTC Hires Noted Privacy Expert And Blogger
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Tags: double verify, google, microsoft, newspapers, specific media, traffic marketplace, x+1, xplusone, yahoo, yahoo apt platform
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
