Archive for September, 2009
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
Gustav von Sydow is CEO and Founder of Burt, an advertising software company and makers of “Rich,” a campaign analytics tool focused on creative agencies.
AdExchanger.com: Burt recently presented “Rich” at DEMO ‘09. Why was it chosen to present? Can you discuss the value proposition?
GvS: Right now, we think of Rich as an educational tool. The main idea is to provide an efficient feedback loop for copywriters, art directors etc. so that they can learn from their previous work.
Naturally, trial-and-error has been one of the main ideas behind providing campaign metrics since like forever, but the reports aren’t really being used by the creative agencies on a wide scale, as I’m sure you know. And if the people actually making ads aren’t using the metrics tools to get feedback on their work, what difference can we expect the reports to make?
The tech side of advertising usually attributes this to a perceived technology aversion on behalf of creative agencies, but that’s simply not true. I love technology, advertising and metrics (heck, I even started a company around it) as much as the next guy but when I worked full time at CP+B I still didn’t use reporting tools to a very large extent.
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Tags: ad exchange, advertising, brand dollars, brand marketing, Creative, creative agency, decisioning, marketing, media buying, optimization
Posted in Creative | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
“The Provocateur” column is intended to incite discussion on a variety of topics around the evolution of digital media.
Lots of conversation and buzz around advertising exchanges (and exchange-like players) such as the Google Advertising Exchange, Right Media at Yahoo!, AdECN at Microsoft, Pubmatic, Rubicon Project, FIM Serve, etc., as they are popping up around the world and are attracting some serious venture investors with deep pockets such as Mayfield, Venrock, and DFJ.
The number of exchanges or exchange-like players is increasing at a higher rate than at any other time in history, and the overall advertising ecosystem is going through a renaissance period. Just this week, Google announced their release of the Google Advertising Exchange which was once called DoubleClick AdEx.
While exchanges are fascinating, they in themselves are not the transformative part of the industry.
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Tags: ad agencies, advertising, darren herman, marketing, media buying, varick media management
Posted in Agencies | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Dogster and $40 CPMs
TechCrunch looks at a new partnership announced between dog lover social network, Dogster, and viral web publishing phenomenon, I Can Haz Cheeseburger. TC’s Sara Lacy says that Dogster has been wise to build relationships directly with advertisers as opposed to going the ad network noting that Dogster can charge $10-$12 CPMs and $40 CPMs for its newsletter. Now Dogster will leverage these advertiser relationships and sell “Cheezburger Network of Lolanimal-related sites that include IHasaHotdog and ICanHazCheezburger.” Read more.
UK Digital Ad Spend Outpaces TV
For the first time ever, the ad spend for the Internet has outpaced its TV rival in the UK. By a margin of 24% to 22% for the first half of 2009, web spending claimed the top spot in budget allocation according to the Internet Advertising Bureau in the UK. Read more.
Subscribing For Ads
PaidContent’s Staci Kramer writes that CNN is launching it’s own live streaming iPhone App (saw it featured on CNN today!) and will be charging users a one-time fee of $2. After the initial charge, users will see ads (Lexus and Chevron have signed on) in addition to their video content. Read more.
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Tags: ad exchanges, ad network, google, media buying, mediaequals, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Dave Morgan is CEO of Simulmedia, a television marketing company that optimizes the effectiveness of “on-air” program promotion.
AdExchanger.com: Have you tired of the online ad business, where you’ve already had success (Tacoda, Real Media)? Confess – don’t you miss banner ads? What prompted you to start Simulmedia?
DM: I am not tired of the online business, but I believe that there is a much greater market opportunity today in applying technology within the television industry. Today, television advertising is a $70 billion market annually in the US and television subscriptions represent another $130 billion per year, and neither side of that business has seen any significant technology-driven optimization for many years. Contrast that to the online world, where US ad spend represents $30 billion per year and, outside of search, it’s already optimized at a 70-80% level.
What learnings from your experience in the online ad business are relevant to TV tune-in optimization?
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Tags: attribution, audience buying, context, dave morgan, Digital TV and Video, media agency, set-top box, simulmedia
Posted in Digital TV and Video | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a new column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Ted Shergalis is Chief Strategy Officer of [x+1], a buy side optimization platform.
The benefits of real time exchanges to buy side participants are clear. Both reach and efficiency should improve in an environment where bidders can pick exactly which impressions they’d like to buy. It may seem as though the exchange environment gives the upper hand to the buy side, but little attention has been paid to potential sell side countermoves. What might publishers do to benefit from the rise of the real time exchange?
The short answer: Publishers will become active participants in the exchange system.
Presently, publishers and sellers have a tendency to regard the exchanges just like any other reseller of their inventory. They see exchanges and ad networks as a simple solution to their excess inventory problem, as the exchanges provide a convenient outlet to make a few dollars off the impressions that their direct sales force was not able to sell while keeping their management costs down. Publishers and sellers are fairly indifferent to whether Right Media, DoubleClick, ValueClick or any other reseller monetizes their inventory for them. Traditionally, this lack of interest in what is done with excess inventory has been justified by the fact that most publishers make approximately 80% of their revenue from direct sales of 20% of their inventory.
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, advertising, demand-side buying platform, DSP, marketing, media buying, x+1
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
WPP Spot Runner Suit Tossed
David Kaplan of PaidContent reports that WPP’s suit against Spot Runner, “a web-based TV creative ad agency”, has been thrown out by a New York court. WPP had said in the suit that its investment in the start-up had been diluted unfairly due to Spot Runner stock sales. Read more.
Leathern On Fraud Study
Rob Leathern of CPM Advisors reviews a recent advertising fraud study on his Zeronomy blog and alleges that the methodology used by mPire and Radar Research is flawed saying among other things, “Certainly, you shouldn’t create an experiment and call it representative of the marketplace when your experiment by design will seek out the very thing you are looking to measure.” Despite the concern, in the end, Leathern says he supports mPire’s AdXpose product. Read more on Zeronomy.
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, ad network, media buying, optimization, WPP
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2009
Matt Greitzer is VP of Search Marketing and Head of ATOM Systems at Razorfish.
AdExchanger.com: What can you tell us about momentum in Razorfish’s ad exchange practice? Any year-over-year comparisons that you can draw?
We’ve only been in market for about nine months, so it’s too early for year-over-year comparisons, but we’ve seen consistent month over month growth since launch. Initially demand was strongest among pure-play direct response advertisers, but recently we’ve started to see real interest from more traditional brand advertisers who are intrigued by the insight and targeting capabilities they can access in the exchange environment. So overall I would say the momentum is strong and getting stronger.
Why are demand-side buying platform strategies taking hold for agencies?
A confluence of events are driving this change, but most significantly among them are the emergence of ad exchanges as a major inventory supply source. Previously if an agency wanted to aggregate demand and make that actionable they had to take an upfront position in inventory. Most agencies aren’t comfortable taking upfront risk so they couldn’t scale these efforts. The ad exchange channel allows for massive inventory aggregation while limiting the risk of getting stuck with unsold inventory, so the economic barriers are easier for an agency to clear. Beyond that, there is a desire to reverse the trend of declining media commissions, an increasing demand for insight and repeatability in display media buying, and a number of technology players who’ve emerged in the last 12-24 facilitating agencies’ entry into this space.
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Tags: ad exchanges, ad network, demand-side buying platforms, display ads, display advertising, media buying, razorfish
Posted in Agencies | No Comments »
Monday, September 28th, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
CPM Tea Party
Shelby Bonnie, the CEO of Whiskey Media – and the co-founder of CNET – , says on TechCrunch that it’s time to kill the CPM as he speaks to his media publishing brethren who can’t seem to get a break as CPMs decline while inventory floods the market. Varick’s Darren Herman calls Bonnie on suggesting “CPM” is a performance metric on his blog. Visit the TechCrunch article here.
AdBrite On Contextual, In-Text Display
Looking to add another line of revenue, AdBrite announced on Friday that it was offering CPC banner ads in addition to contextual, text ad links as part of its “InLineAd” product originally popularized by Vibrant Media. Read the release.
Convincing Marketers About Display
MediaPost’s Mark Walsh looks at last Thursday’s Advertising Week panel discussion that included execs from Facebook and Google. Walsh writes that the execs were trying to convince marketers that online advertising works – in particular display advertising. Eileen Naughton of Google’s media platforms group is quoted as saying, “Half of all display ad dollars in the U.S. are display ad dollars.” Better be! Read more. For an Ad Week round up from the NYT’s Stuart Elliott and Stephanie Clifford, click here.
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Tags: advertising week, aol, arbitrage, CPM, display advertising, doubleclick ad exchange, google, media buying, spam, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Sunday, September 27th, 2009
Matt Spiegel is CEO of OMG Digital, the digital media buying division of Omnicom Group.
Certainly, the new Google DoubleClick Ad Exchange will have big impact because it’s the first sizable pool of inventory which has real-time bidding – this is what we’ve been waiting for.
Being able to buy using real-time bidding is important for two reasons:
- We want to pay for the value of the impression based on that impression.
- We want to make those value decisions based on targeting criteria that we can bring to the table.
Today, we have certain ability to impact those targeting decisions much like there is in search from a bid rule perspective, but the targeting decisions are made in an offline way, if you will. What I mean by this is we look at performance, audience and contextual data and then model out that information to create segments and micro-segments which we can then bid on. In a real-time, bidded environment, those pieces come together and, in a real-time way, we can have a model for that impression and bid for it right away.
The impact on the industry of the new exchange from Google is significant because of the scale of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. There’s a ton of inventory. We haven’t seen that scale ever on a real-time basis. AppNexus is out in the marketplace, but it’s clearly a smaller pool of inventory.
Regarding concerns, I don’t see any right now. Of course, no one wants to see Google hold all the cards, but Google is innovating and we can’t give them anything but kudos from that perspective. For the moment, it’s good stuff.
[more reaction]
Tags: ad agency, ad exchanges, doubleclick ad exchange, media buying, omg digital, omnicom, omnicom media group
Posted in Agencies | No Comments »
Friday, September 25th, 2009
Internet entrepreneur and now writer, Michael Wolff, opened today’s ContextWeb event on media trading saying, “This is a desperate time for the media business.”
Well…. one person’s desperation is apparently someone else’s opportunity as a full-house invaded the Paley Media Center in New York City. Entitled,”Agency Demand Platforms: Is Everyone a Media Trader?,” the event was similar to a July ContextWeb event as key decision makers from major holding companies and agencies were gathered together for a panel moderated by ContextWeb’s EVP Jay Sears.
Overall, there weren’t too many fireworks during the 40-minute panel which included Curt Hecht, President of VivaKi Nerve Center under Publicis; Quentin George, Managing Partner, Cadreon and IPG’s Mediabrands; Darren Herman, President of Varick Media Management from MDC Partners and Media Kitchen; Razorfish VP Matt Greitzer; and Havas Digital and Adnetik Managing Director, Nathan Woodman.
During the intros, Woodman from Havas and its demand-side platform, Adnetik, discussed why the buying platform strategy has taken hold with his agency saying simply, “You have to value the media and you have to value the audience – and do them independently. [With Adnetik] We hope to do that in a way that guarantees for our advertisers a buying efficiency: they will never pay more for an ad than it is worth.”
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Tags: adnetik, advertising, havas, marketing, media buying, razorfish, varick media, vivaki, web publisher
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Friday, September 25th, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a new column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Pascal Bensoussan, VP of Products at Aggregate Knowledge, a buy-side optimization platform.
In 2006, Greg Stuart, Interactive Advertising Bureau CEO, estimated that advertisers’ waste, that is, impressions reaching the wrong audience or none at all, was $112 billion a year in America and $220 billion worldwide, or just over half of their total spending. Wanamaker was remarkably accurate.
In 2009, we have made little progress. A recent research from ComScore indicates that only a small minority of campaigns reach their intended audience with the desired frequency. Of eight U.S. brand campaigns with budgets between $400,000 and $2 million, ComScore said none reached more than 20 percent of their target with a frequency of four impressions or less. Up to 80 percent of the impressions were delivered either to the wrong segments in the U.S., or to consumers outside the U.S.
A number of factors are to blame for this situation:
1. Reaching audiences based on context is expensive and not particularly effective. Yet, media planners and media buyers are only trained to buy audiences based on the media they consume. It takes a fair amount of interpretation and mapping to turn the target audience defined in a creative brief into a robust media plan. Emerging technologies enabling multi-party cookie synching, real-time decisioning, real-time bidders, and media de-risking with new classes of publishers and ad networks, provide effective means to buy the right audiences directly instead of guessing the web properties they might visit.
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Tags: ad agency, ad exchanges, Ad Networks, Data-Driven Thinking, doubleclick ad exchange, media buying
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | No Comments »
Friday, September 25th, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
Brand Metrics Win
On the Lightspeed Venture Partners blog, Jeremy Liew argues that a saavy seller who can speak to brand metrics will help win and sustain business for ad networks in the future. Liew writes, “CPG, one of the core categories for brand advertising, is starting to shift online this year in a meaningful way. But brand advertisers need to be sold to the way that they want to buy. Not all online sales teams know how to do that.” He adds that only Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and Brand.net are doing it effectively today. Read his post.
Bullish On Ads
New York City’s Advertising Week festivities come to a close today and The Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital Dispatch blog declares that there’s optimism in the ad world. Bain Capital Managing Director Ian Lorin tells the WSJ’s Ty Mahan that things are looking up if for no other reason, “At some point people will have to talk to their customers.” Read more.
News As Non-Profit
Yet another idea has surfaced on how to save the newspaper industry. This one is being seeded by investor F. Warren Hellman who has provided $5 million for a non-profit local newspaper in the San Francisco area. The newspaper will employ staff from a local radio and UC Berkeley’s journalism school. Read Richard Pena’s article in The New York Times.
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Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Adam Cahill is SVP, Director of Digital Media at Hill Holliday, a full-service communications agency.
What trends are you seeing from your digital media clients today?
Two of the more interesting trends are social media listening and rapid response marketing, and although clients have been asking for these independently, they’re actually closely related. Our clients want to use listening to generate insights that can impact marketing activities. At the same time, many of our clients have a need to be in market with relevant messages much more quickly than they have in the past.
As a result we’ve begun using listening in a very action-oriented way. We identify opportunities through social listening and then quickly deploy marketing programs.
Is Hill Holiday pursuing a demand-side buying platform strategy? Why or why not?
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Tags: ad agencies, Ad Networks, advertising, hill holliday, marketing, media agencies
Posted in Agencies | No Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Joanna L. O’Connell is Manager of Strategic Development, ATOM Systems, Razorfish.
The word “transparency” seems to be everyone’s favorite word these days. Clients want it, publishers fear it, and networks – increasingly – boast that they offer it. I’d like to propose that we’re thinking about this word in the wrong way and suggest that we as an industry consider changing our definition.
First, some background. In my previous life as a media supervisor, I spent most of my days working on campaigns featuring 5 to 15 3rd party ad networks at any given time. While our network-heavy plans generally performed well from a direct response standpoint, they didn’t tell us much about what was working and why. From an optimization standpoint, I was very limited, making poorly-informed, surface-level optimization decisions which never seemed to lead to the same result (“let’s cut the 728×90’s… no wait, let’s put those back in…no wait!”). While maybe we knew what sites we “might” be running on thanks to the fully transparent site list we sometimes received, we never knew what was actually happening and why so we could learn and repeat it.
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Tags: ad agencies, ad exchanges, media buying, media trading, razorfish, search, the executioner, transparency
Posted in Agencies | No Comments »
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
AOL Talks Exchanges
David Kaplan of PaidContent cornered AOL’s Jeff Levick at the OMMA conference in New York City this week and asked whether or not AOL would be interested in its own exchange – especially in light of the recent hoopla around the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Levick provides the big media publisher cliche and says he’s not interested in anything that drives down pricing. Given the swarm of data at AOL, there appears to be a way to drive value using the exchange model. Which reminds me… what’s going on with the AOL’s BidPlace – the exchange announced in 2008? The small business version, BidPlace SB, was profiled here in April. Read the article in PaidContent.
My Brand Is Bigger Than Your Brand
AOL and Yahoo! are duking it out according to an article by Emily Steel of The Wall Street Journal. In a battle for face time with the media titans who control ad spending. Quentin George, chief digital officer of Mediabrands and Cadreon fame notes, “It’s a fevered pitch,” as each brand looks to resurrect itself from a moribund recent history. Steel’s report reveals how the portal has fallen out of favor as audience buying has taken over. Read more.
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, advertising, aol, demand-side buying platforms, marketing
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
“Data Driven Thinking” is a column written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Rob Leathern, CEO of CPM Advisors, an online advertising company.
In the online ad business we often get caught up in flawed comparisons to the financial services industry. It’s an “exchange”, “market”, impressions or clicks are seen as a commodity when they are not. Many people reading this right now are building their companies around the notion of correctly valuing an impression and then getting one of their ads there (or else passing it on to someone else), and yet we’re stuck in a place without the data we need to really make a decision.
The Right Media Exchange (RMX) started out as a platform where impressions were mostly seen by the participants as commodities, bought and sold in bulk by ad networks with too many of them or not enough of them, and then sometimes with hope springing eternal, broken into buckets by “channel”: each publisher or network would classify their sites’ traffic into one of 20 or 30 channels like automotive, technology, business or shopping. The ad networks who were RMX’s first clients would use the channel designation to target their campaigns and then the RMX system would take care of bidding differentially based on other elements like user frequency that were harder for humans to manipulate and assess the value of themselves. Of course it turns out there were some other attributes the advertiser side wanted and it was dutifully added in a fairly ad-hoc fashion, like whether the inventory was a website or a desktop application, was there unmoderated UGC on the site, and so on. More recent exchange participants were lured by the promise of billions of commodity-like impressions they could bid on, with a few exclusions of things they didn’t want: but they very quickly learned the wide variance in performance of those impressions they got to see, and the long time it took to hone in on the ones that actually did perform.
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Tags: advertising, cpm advisors, Data, Data-Driven Thinking, demand-side buying platforms, marketing, rob leathern
Posted in Data-Driven Thinking | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.
$9 Million For Rubicon Project
Rubicon Project brought in another $9 million in equity investment to “continue pursuing acquisitions and global expansion.” Leading in this round was GE/NBCU’s Peacock Equity Fund which invested $6 million investment with existing investors Clearstone Venture Partners and Mayfield Fund anteing up the rest. This bring total investment up to $42 million. And not rest for the funded, as CEO Frank Addante tweets that he’s on his way to the “DMEXCO conference in Cologne to do keynote speech.” Read the release.
Talking Grail With Microsoft
Mediaweek’s Mike Shields talks “Holy Grail” and cross-channel marketing with Microsoft VP Scott Howe of their advertiser and publisher solutions group. In regards to Microsoft’s advertising ambitions, Howe tells Shields, “If Bing is step one [for Microsoft Advertising], step two is extending that engine to power the ads that someone sees across all display ad formats and multiple devices.”
Read more.
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Tags: ad agency, aol, display advertising, doubleclick ad exchange, google, media agency, media buying, pubmatic, right media exchange, rubicon project, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
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ComScore and Omniture (and Adobe)
Fresh off being acquired by Adobe, Omniture announced a new partnership with ComScore aimed at unifiying reporting of website analytics and audience measurement. Is this another step toward a better attribution model? It can’t hurt. Jonathan Mendez tweets that pubs aren’t going to like the lower reporting of web analytics. Read the release.
It Isn’t Me?
“It’s You” is the new, huge marketing campaign aimed and reinvigorating the Yahoo! brand message according to an article by Suzanne Vranica and Jessica Vascellaro in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. Leading the creative charge is WPP’s Ogilvy and Mather. Read more. Given the Yahoo! portal’s nearly 100% reach of the U.S. audience as well as competitive reach numbers for worldwide users, a remarketing, display ad campaign bought through various supply sources including the Right Media Exchange and DoubleClick Ad Exchange would seem in order. Who’s on this?
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Tags: ad exchanges, Ad Networks, advertising, comscore, doubleclick ad exchange, marketing, media buying, omniture, right media exchange, yahoo
Posted in Ad Exchange News | No Comments »
Monday, September 21st, 2009
Darren Herman is the Founder and President of Varick Media Management, an audience and media buying platform, and a unit of MDC Partners.
DH: We (at VMM) are excited about the promise of the next version of exchanges. A lot of talk has been around real-time bidding and Google should deliver on this. The impact for our clients and the industry is tremendous, as real-time bidding allows intelligent marketers to purchase impression level inventory.
The challenge will be for “real-time bidding” to scale beyond Google as not everyone buys their inventory in one place. After all, PPC advertising is click level bidding and that’s 67% Googled and 33% split between Yahoo, MSN and the rest of the industry.
An additional challenge will be for agencies to adopt this new way of buying. They have choices: build out the capability under their own roof, or use outsourced services/platform group. Understanding impression level data and real-time bidding is very quantitative and agencies will soon realize that they have to make very specialized hires. Not sure traditional agency business models can afford a mass of these types of hires.
[more reaction]
Tags: ad network, Agencies, doubleclick ad exchange, google, mdc partners, media buying, media kitchen, varick media management
Posted in Agencies | No Comments »
