VOLUME II
January 1 – April 30, 2010
The Q&A’s
Learn from the Ecosystem
TABLE OF CONTENTS
AGENCIES .................................................................................................................................. 8
Innovation Interactive Leveraging Dentsu To Expand Search/Display Offering And More Says Co-CEO
Margiloff ......................................................................................................................................................................................8
Mediabrands’ Cadreon Verifying Ads And Audience; Audience-Level Attribution Is Coming Says VP
Brunick ......................................................................................................................................................................................10
VivaKi’s David Kenny On The Agency Challenge, Creative And Automation ........................................................11
Former Mindshare CEO Scott Neslund Appointed Red Bricks Media CEO; Discusses Digital Strategy ........13
Innovation Interactive Leveraging Dentsu To Expand Search/Display Offering And More Says Co-CEO
Margiloff ....................................................................................................................................................................................14
AD NETWORKS & EXCHANGES ............................................................................................ 16
24/7 Real Media’s Pangis Looks At Her Company’s Publisher Platform Solutions ..............................................16
Adconion Unveils New Joost Video Network, Positioning For Video Platform Future ........................................18
Adgregate Markets Releases ShopFans; CEO Wong Looks At Display And Social Media ................................19
PointRoll Gets Ecommerce And Adgregate Markets In Its Media ..............................................................................21
Adgregate Markets Announces ShopFans, Gives Exclusive First Look To IPG’s Emerging Media Labs ......22
Advertisers Overlaying Third-Party Data On Vertical Ad Networks Today Says Adify CEO Fradin .................23
AdRoll CEO Bell Discusses Self-Service Retargeting...................................................................................................24
Germany’s AdScale Expecting Revenues To Double In 2010 Says CEO Pantke ...................................................25
Unleashing The AOL Display Ad Beast: Ad Desk And Display Strategy With AOL’s Fellows, Jacobs and
Kennedy ....................................................................................................................................................................................27
Former US Search CEO Jeff Pullen On His New Role At Audience Science ..........................................................34
AudienceScience CEO Hirsch Discusses Publisher Platform, Ad Network ............................................................35
Brand.net CEO Blair On Company’s Video Initiatives And VAST ..............................................................................36
Collective Discusses AMP Platform’s New Engagement Metrics And Above-The-Fold Targeting ...................38
Orange-France Telecom And OpenX Launch A New Ad Exchange In Europe .......................................................40
TRAFFIQ CEO Kahn On Datran Media Integration And Audience Buying Pain Points ........................................43
TRAFFIQ CEO Kahn Looks At TAAN Partnership And Exclusivity Among Agency Holding Companies.......45
ContextWeb EVP Sears Discusses RTB Roll-out And PubMatic Partnership ........................................................47
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FetchBack CEO Little On Recommendation Retargeting And Recent Developments .........................................48
Rocket Fuel Addressing Brands And Attribution Says Pres Frankel .......................................................................49
Smartclip’s Prohaska Discusses Company’s Video Ad Network Model ..................................................................51
Yahoo!’s Wise And McGrory On Demand-Side Platform Pilot Program, Real-Time Bidding .............................53
ANALYSTS ............................................................................................................................... 55
Data Nugget: Banner Ad Spending Will Be 20.9% Of Internet Ad Spending This Year Says eMarketer’s
Hallerman ..................................................................................................................................................................................55
BUYING PLATFORMS ............................................................................................................. 56
AdBuyer.com Releases New, Free Audience Profiles Product; CEO Ogilvie Says Company Looking To
Improve Efficiency For Search Marketers ........................................................................................................................56
AdGear Building A New Ad Serving Platform For Advertisers And Publishers Says VP Stesin .......................58
Brandscreen Offering Demand-Side And Sell-Side Platform Trading Solutions Says CEO Tol ........................61
Chango To Extend Search’s Reach Into Display With Demand-Side Platform ......................................................63
CPM Advisors Leveraging Mediageeks’ Technology For Demand-Side Platform .................................................66
XA.net And eXelate Look At Strong Results Of Brand Study .....................................................................................68
DataXu CEO Baker On New Funds And Demand-Side Platform Services Layer ...................................................70
Invite Media Opens In UK; Discusses European Opportunity ....................................................................................71
Invite Media On RTB And Online Display Ad Media Buying Today ...........................................................................73
LucidMedia Joins The Demand-Side Platform Race; Announces ADvisor DSP ....................................................75
OwnerIQ Using Insights On Ownership Signals For Targeting Says CEO Habegger...........................................79
Simpli.fi Addressing Search Marketers With A Demand-Side Platform Says CEO Prioleau ..............................82
Triggit To Open Real-Time Bidding To All Advertisers Says CEO Coelius .............................................................86
Turn Highlights IPG Cadreon Relationship, New Planning Tools; CEO Demas Discusses Platform Updates
.....................................................................................................................................................................................................88
Turn Announces Agency Holding Company Client: Omnicom Media Group; Upgrades Platform Features .90
x+1’s Nardone Discusses Cookie-Level Integration Of Brand Research Data .......................................................92
CEO Nardone Discusses Merkle, X+1 Partnership And Customer-Centric Marketing .........................................94
X+1 CEO Nardone On Update To Company’s Demand-Side Platform Technology ..............................................97
CREATIVE OPTIMIZATION AND PROVIDERS ....................................................................... 99
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New Dapper CEO Beriker On The Direct Response Display Channel.......................................................................99
Eyeblaster Research Shows Audience Buying Habits Says Geifman ....................................................................100
CEO Kartzman Says Spongecell Increasing Engagement, Interaction In Display Advertising........................102
CEO Calvin Lui Plays The Cloud Card With Tumri’s Marketing Analytics Offering ............................................104
DATA AND MEASUREMENT ................................................................................................. 106
Aggregate Knowledge CEO Paul Martino On Big Data, DSPs and New Funds ....................................................108
Aggregate Knowledge Adopts New, BlueKai Server-To-Server Technology For More Efficient Data
Management Says VP Bensoussan .................................................................................................................................109
aWhere Location Solutions Offer Digital Marketers In-Store Sales Insights Says CEO Corbett .....................111
CEO Glass On New Self-Service Media Buying Tool From Bizo ..............................................................................113
Bizo Partners With Ad Network Martini Media, Finds B2B Fit With B2C ................................................................114
CEO Tawakol Discusses BlueKai Pulse Index And Intender Signal Strength ......................................................115
BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol Discusses Recent Investment And Plans .................................................................116
Digital Element On Postcode Targeting And U.S. And Europe Tech Targeting Interest ...................................117
eXelate’s Zagorski Discusses Nielsen PRIZM Offline Data Integration, Looks At Impact .................................119
CEO Jain Says JovianDATA Enabling Insights On Data For Ad Networks, Agencies, Advertisers And
Publishers ...............................................................................................................................................................................121
Kantar Media’s SVP Swallen Discusses New Ad Network Stats Capabilities .......................................................124
Knowledge Networks Providing Actionable Research Results In Real-Time Says VP Kahlert .......................125
Lijit Networks Enabling Audience Targeting Through Mid And Long Tail Search Functionality Says COO
Knapp .......................................................................................................................................................................................127
Milabra Optimizing Ad Targeting Visually And Improving Brand Safety Says CEO Cox ...................................130
Magnetic CEO Discusses $1.25 Million Funding And Company Launch ...............................................................134
Magnetic Bringing Transparency To Customer Segments In Display By Leveraging Power Of Search Says
CEO Shatkin-Margolis .........................................................................................................................................................135
Netezza Offering Solution For Big Math, Big Data In Digital Advertising ..............................................................137
Netmining Focused on DR And Performance Marketing For Now Says Margiloff ..............................................138
CEO Ellenthal Discusses His New Role At Peer39 ......................................................................................................139
CRO Teresi On MTVN Deal And Quantcast’s Cross-Digital Potential .....................................................................141
Quantcast’s Feldman On Delivering Local Country Audience Insights .................................................................143
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Rapleaf Focusing On Social Data And Enabling Advertisers To Buy Audiences That Have Affinities With
Their Brand Says CEO Hoffman ........................................................................................................................................144
Rapleaf Enhancing NetProspex Contact Database, Discusses B2B Social Data ................................................146
Scout Analytics Bringing Actionable, Behavioral Insights To Publishers Says SVP Shanahan .....................147
VisualDNA Using Visual Methods To Enable Effective Ad Targeting Says CEO Wilcock .................................150
Auditude Offering Automated Video Management Platform And Supporting VAST Says CEO Cahan .........157
Co-CEO Knopper Reviews FreeWheel’s Latest Financing And Product Features ..............................................159
FreeWheel Creates PAVE, Discusses Necessity Of Fully-Integrated Video Solutions For Publishers ..........160
Innovid Choosing Pre-Roll To Grow Platform Says CEO Netter ..............................................................................161
CEO Morgan On Simulmedia’s Financing And Data-Driven Television Insights .................................................165
New Simulmedia CRO Jon Werther Looks At Growing Opportunity For Digital In TV .......................................166
Tremor Media CEO Glickman On Investment And Opportunity Ahead In Video .................................................167
SEARCH MARKETING ........................................................................................................... 170
The Clickable Goal: “The Apple of Online Advertising” For Search And Social Says CEO Kidder ................172
April 26, 2010 – 12:05 am ......................................................................................................................................................174
Efficient Frontier Announces Its Demand-Side Platform; Adds Display Media Buying Capabilities To Its
Search Platform .....................................................................................................................................................................175
Trada Growing A Marketplace For Expertise In PPC Marketing Says CEO Robertson ......................................177
DIGITAL OUT-OF-HOME........................................................................................................ 180
Argo Digital Solutions CEO Kates Discusses Digital-Out-Of-Home Audience Buying And Planning With
rVue 2.0 ....................................................................................................................................................................................180
LEAD GENERATION .............................................................................................................. 182
Inuvo CEO Howe Reviews $4.2 Million Public Offering And Lead Generation Opportunity .............................182
MOBILE................................................................................................................................... 184
Flurry CEO Khalaf On New Funds And Current Mobile Ad Network Performance ..............................................184
Mobile Ad Network Jumptap Discusses The iPad Advertising Opportunity .........................................................186
Mobclix’ Subramanian Looks At Heartbeat Acquisition And Mobile Ad Performance.......................................188
Criteo Brings Scale To Display Retargeting Says CEO Rudelle ...............................................................................190
Mexad Enabling Ad Exchange Buying Across Europe Says CEO Berlik...............................................................192
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MediaTrust CEO Bordes Discusses Bardon Acquisition And Performance Marketing Momentum ...............195
PerformLine Offering Cross-Digital Channel Verification Says CEO Baydin .......................................................197
TellApart Targeting Incremental Revenue For E-Commerce Says CEO McFarland ............................................199
PUBLISHERS ......................................................................................................................... 202
PlentyOfFish.com CEO Frind Says Selling Your Site’s Data Will Reduce Your Site’s CPMs ...........................202
United Online’s CSO Helfand Discusses Adcurate Audience-Buying Platform ...................................................204
MEDIA BUYING AD TECHNOLOGY ...................................................................................... 205
Centro Looks To Automate The Buying Of Premium Inventory With Transis Says Pres Riegsecker ............205
What Atlas And DoubleClick Did For Direct Marketers, Pictela Will Do For Brand Marketers Says CEO
Rogers .....................................................................................................................................................................................207
The Trade Desk CEO Green Announces Funding And Investors ............................................................................209
PLATFORM TECHNOLOGY .................................................................................................. 211
AppNexus Is A Real-Time Ad Platform – The On-Ramp For Companies Like DSPs Says CEO O’Kelley .....211
PUBLISHER AD TECHNOLOGY ........................................................................................... 213
aiMatch To Build Value In Direct And Third-Party Inventory Says CEO Wood ....................................................213
GM Burke Says FatTail Offering Supply-Side Platform Solution .............................................................................215
Yieldbot To Offer Publishers Control Of Their Data Says Mendez ..........................................................................218
ZEDO Optimizing Publishers’ Ad Networks And Providing Self-Serve Platform Says CEO de Souza ..........220
PRIVACY REGULATION ........................................................................................................ 222
Better Advertising Will Create More Trust Between Consumers, Companies And The Government Says
CEO Meyer ..............................................................................................................................................................................222
RESEARCH ............................................................................................................................ 225
Winterberry Group Releases Brand Safety Report – It’s Not Necessarily About Full Transparency For
Marketers ................................................................................................................................................................................225
TARGETING TECHNOLOGY ................................................................................................. 227
OpenAmplify CEO Redgrave Discusses Brand Engagement With Semantic Technology ...............................227
Resonate Networks CEO Gernert On Attitudinal Versus Demographic, Psychographic Targeting ...............228
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SOCIAL TARGETING AND MARKETING .............................................................................. 231
Europe Ahead In Mobile And Creative, But Behind In Rich Media, Video And Data Says VP van den Heuvel
of Amsterdam-based eBuddy ............................................................................................................................................231
Hooked Media Group Looking To Address Publisher Model With Yoo-Mee Says CEO Uppal ........................233
Sprout Providing Engagement Through Display Ads For Brand Marketers Says CEO Williams ....................235
TRAFFIC TOOLS: SERVING, QUALITY AND ATTRIBUTION .............................................. 237
Ad-Juster CEO Lewis Discusses Traction And SaaS Implications .........................................................................237
Adometry Offering Effectiveness Metrics And Verification Says CEO Ewel .........................................................239
AdSafe Media On Transparency Into Display Ad Inventory And iFrame Challenge ...........................................241
New Report Says Social Networks Have Less Click Fraud .......................................................................................243
Anchor Intelligence CEO Miller On New Search Product And Audience Targeting ............................................245
Convertro Tackling Cookie-Free Attribution For Digital Marketers Says CEO Zwelling ....................................248
DoubleVerify’s Netzer Verifies Capital Raise And Company Plans .........................................................................251
Mpire Announces Ad Blocking For AdXpose; CEO Kirby Winfield Discusses Feature And Clients ..............252
Mpire Announces AdXpose API; CRO Winfield Discusses Pricing and Services Layer ...................................253
TagMan GM And Founder Baron Discusses Funding And Business Momentum ...............................................254
TrackSimple Looking To Layer Predictive Analysis On Actionable, Big Data Says CEO Ingalls ....................255
BACK OFFICE ........................................................................................................................ 258
Solbright CEO Pace Says Advertising Will Remain Major Way Publishers Create Revenue; Discusses
Company’s Back Office Solutions....................................................................................................................................258
VENTURE CAPITAL ............................................................................................................... 261
M&A This Year, Especially Q3 And Q4 Says DeSilva+Phillips’ MacDonald ..........................................................261
First Round Capital’s Fralic Says Team and Market Size Are More Important Than Product ..........................262
Demand-Side Platforms, Small Advertiser Solutions And Social Targeting Interest Highland Capital’s
Nichols .....................................................................................................................................................................................264
YIELD OPTIMIZATION ........................................................................................................... 266
PubMatic CEO Goel On Ad Price Index And Publishers ............................................................................................268
CEO Goel Discusses PubMatic Premier Platform, Defines Its Version Of The Sell-Side Platform (SSP) ......269
Rubicon Project Announces Real-Time Bidding And Publisher Controls .............................................................271
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Agencies
Innovation Interactive Leveraging Dentsu To Expand
Search/Display Offering And More Says Co-CEO Margiloff
March 29, 2010 – 1:03 pm
Will Margiloff is Founder and co-CEO of Innovation Interactive, a
digital marketing services company owned by ad holding company,
Dentsu.
Can you share the progress being made with the integration
into Dentsu? Any unforeseen synergies being unlocked at this
early stage?
We are in the early stages of our deal so many of the opportunities
are just unfolding. Both Dentsu and Innovation Interactive’s core
business philosophies are very similar in that we put the client at
the center and develop services and solutions around their needs.
So some of the immediate opportunities we see involve offering
expanded services to Dentsu's customers across the digital
spectrum ranging from search/display management and attribution
technology, audience network offerings and agency solutions such
as paid search management and social media strategy.
Please discuss Innovation Interactive's DSP strategy.
First, we don’t believe that DSPs will save the world. DSPs will
definitively give agencies better control, transparency and data
collection capabilities where they didn’t have it before. But they will
not replace 100% of display inventory. There will always be room
for network buys with differentiated offerings whether that is unique
data used for targeting, vertical players or added capabilities such as advanced analytics as an offering on top of a
media buy.
We’ve been running a DSP in effect for several years at Innovation Interactive. We have all of the components -from a search optimization and attribution technology (DSSP-Demand Side Search Platform), to the necessary
hooks into the exchanges and direct inventory sources, to the data warehousing and application of that data to
optimize media spend and performance. With millions of clicks from $550 million in annual spend, $8 billion in
transactions and on-site behavioral information on millions of users (used only with permission from our clients),
our data is farther down the funnel and richer than most companies in the space. We also have a sizable in-house
media buying team that’s spent years buying on the exchanges and on an auction model. We’re far along in our
efforts in this area, which we began years ago because we saw efficient auction-based media capabilities as a
core and increasingly more important benefit to our clients. (use of the data is only done with permission from our
clients)
What's your view regarding exchange buying? Is it the next big thing? Can it "go global?"
It is definitely a U.S based phenomenon right now. We have offices in Japan (#2 market), UK (the #3 market) and
Brussels (Headquarters for our European operations). We don't see exchanges flourishing the way they are in the
U.S yet. We believe they will soon, so it’s critical that agencies build their DSP offerings in a flexible way for
international capabilities.
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Do you see pricing models changing? Will cost per engagement become a standard?
On the performance display side, you’re going to continue to see CPM and CPA/rev share pricing. Just about
everyone agrees that CPC pricing is the wrong model for graphical ad units for branding. For video and rich media
advertising, you’ll see a combination of CPM and CPE. While CPE is appealing because you are paying for
performance, the effective CPMs can often be higher than marketers can bear. In those cases, they’d prefer to pay
on a CPM and optimize on a CPE.
In general, how do you see the media agency model evolving over the next 2-3 years?
Depends on the client objective. For brand work, I see a movement towards a fixed fee model based on a scope of
work, although commission based models will still be prevalent. For direct response objectives, we see a lot of
momentum towards pure or hybrid based agency compensation models where a material portion of the agency’s
compensation is based on exceeding definable ROI objectives. This model has both more risk and more reward for
the agency as the floor compensation is much lower but the agency is able to participate in upside value they
produce. Value based compensation aligns compensation between agencies, publishers and marketers.
Do you have a data strategy for Innovation Interactive? If so, can you share the broad strokes of it?
We have a rich set of proprietary data which we are warehousing and applying to the optimization of media. Our
search marketing optimization and media attribution technology SearchIgnite measures both PPC and SEO click
and conversion data, while our audience targeting platform Netmining gathers a wide variety of site analytics and
display click stream and conversion data. We also gather a variety of social and earned media data for clients
utilizing our digital and social planning capabilities. With all of this data, we’re focused on helping our clients
optimize and properly attribute performance to better understand how various media channels are working
together.
So we are better positioned than most companies due to the fact that our data is farther down the funnel and thus
more relevant and we own the proprietary technology that gathers it. We believe that leads to better transparency
and results for our clients. (use of the data is only done with permission from our clients)
Should agencies build and/or buy technology? Or should they just "rent"? What's Innovation Interactive's
view?
This is simple. It depends on their capabilities first and then their use and acceptance of technology. We believe it
is important to own the technology but that plays well with our client’s needs. There are other companies that focus
on other elements of a client’s needs and just don’t need to own the technology to be successful. An example of
this is an agency that does mainly creative with limited full-service clients. For a company like this, it might be
better for their business model and their clients to rent rather than own technology. It really is a DNA thing.
Follow Will Margiloff (@wmargiloff), Denstu America (@dentsu_america) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger)
on Twitter.
March 29, 2010 – 1:03 pm
9
Mediabrands’ Cadreon Verifying Ads And Audience;
Audience-Level Attribution Is Coming Says VP Brunick
April 2, 2010 – 9:20 am
IPG Mediabrands' agency trading desk, Cadreon, recently
announced plans to track and verify audience in addition to
integrating ad verification vendor technology. Read more on
MediaPost.
Cadreon's VP of Media Technology Michael Brunick discussed the latest developments in the holding company's
trading desk strategies.
AdExchanger.com: Regarding new audience verification strategy, Cadreon will use "various Research
methods to validate the data being acquired is reaching the desired Audience member." Can you provide
any more insight on what these methods will be? For example, will you be comparing URLs to Comscore
or Nielsen panel data for those sites?
I unfortunately can't really go deep into the methodology on this publicly just yet, but the focus won't be on URLs or
domains, but on verifying the actual audience profiles we are buying, acquiring or appending for our clients'
campaigns. The purpose of this is twofold: first, we want to ensure that are messaging to the right people,
delivering on the promise of zero-waste targeting; second, we want to be certain that our clients are getting what
they pay for - as larger portions of budget get spent on data, we need to be extremely diligent in protecting that
spend in the same manner we do with inventory today.
Cadreon says it is using nearly all the ad verification vendors. Why? Are you waiting to find one that works
best?
We have tested and/or integrated with almost all of the verification vendors in the marketplace today - we first
wanted to make sure we had the ability to implement this functionality for any client or campaign that needed it.
The partners we are now focusing on and ultimately feel are best are the services that have gone beyond simply
reporting violations, and are enabling real-time blocking capabilities. To take that a step further, it is critical that
those partners also integrate with our back-end transactional platforms to ensure that the ads that get blocked do
not incur any cost to the campaign - to essentially make the blocking decision before the bid gets made. That is the
key piece of functionality in the verification ecosystem.
What is Cadreon doing about attribution?
We are continuing to push attribution models forward, while working within the constraints of some of the inherent
methodologies that exist in the industry today. De-duplication currently favors the largest inventory providers for
attribution credit, and last-click models still dominate. We have evaluated a few partners that are enabling
advanced models and capabilities, providing enhanced flexibility and customization in attribution assignment, and
will continue evaluating new technologies and capabilities as they become available. We have also taken steps to
bring attribution to the audience level - assigning credit to individual data providers and audience profiles used on
campaigns. There will be more to come on this shortly, so stay tuned!
By John Ebbert
April 2, 2010 – 9:20 am
10
VivaKi’s David Kenny On The Agency Challenge, Creative
And Automation
February 10, 2010 – 11:57 am
David Kenny is Managing Partner of VivaKi, which combines the
media and digital assets of the Publicis Groupe including Starcom,
Zenith, Mediavest, Optimedia, Digitas, Razorfish and Denuo.
AdExchanger.com: Everyone is talking about how agencies
need to evolve media buying. Every major holding company
has announced a media trading desk strategy. What areas of
the workflow have not been addressed? What is the "not
obvious" stuff?"
DK: When the industry talks about media trading, they generally talk
about negotiating clout and leveraging investment strength to drive
lower prices on inventory. The ability to do this is, of course, more
important than ever given the economic crisis from which our clients
are only just beginning to recover. But it's really the price-of-entry.
What we need to do more aggressively is leverage our scale to
achieve advantages beyond price. For example, VivaKi faces the
media owners and the networks to find new ways to add value to
our agency brands and their clients. To aggregate data. To target
people more accurately and effectively. We are building a smarter
service model as an aggregator of scaled audiences that are
identified for their passions, and we are building the pipelines like
Audience on Demand that connect clients to those audiences in
meaningful, relevant ways.
"Trading" for VivaKi is as much about data solutions, marketplace intelligence and digital hubs as it is about
aggregating investment dollars to get the best price. We want to become the world's best at leveraging our scale
and clout to deliver performance marketing, search, mobile, new connections in an ever changing, digital world.
Trading clout can also be leveraged to open new content opportunities. Our Microsoft Agreement, for example,
includes the creation, production and distribution of new programming ideas across the digital palette. By working
with partners to co-create new content and experiences, we can secure more opportunities to make brands an
authentic part of the entertainment consumers seek.
AdExchanger.com: Following up on my first question, how do you see the creative agency evolving in the
future given the continued integration of technology in media?
DK: The industry is mesmerized by technology and gadgets, as well we should be because the consumer is also
mesmerized. And clearly the process of finding and reaching people has shifted with the advent of devices and
platforms that cater to consumer choice and control. The old, linear process of conceiving an idea, producing
content and then pushing it across touchpoints is no longer relevant.
But that doesn't make the idea or the creative content less important. In fact, the new realities demand higher
levels of creativity, and every agency on earth should be stretching those muscles. The high-tech, multiple screen,
time shifted, consumer-in-control world we live in is a call to action for more brilliant content, as well as ideas and
experiences that capture the imagination of people.
The best agencies understand this new paradigm. They recognize that ideas are still essential, but that now those
ideas have to be understood in context. Knowing where a consumer might intersect with a message is as
11
important as the message itself. Sometimes the platform across which a message is delivered - a social network,
for example - generates more energy than the words or images.
Smart agencies are reinventing the production process to deliver addressable content fast but still flawlessly. They
are finding ways to accommodate the reality that ideas have to resonate across third, fourth, multiple screens.
We need to make our creative content accessible, searchable, manipulatable, etc. for today's consumer. The
creative agencies that can re-imagine the very important contributions they make will be a huge part of their clients'
competitive advantage because they are still keepers of ideas that build iconic brands. That said, the "creative"
agencies also have to understand that ideas are not their exclusive domain. Content creators are everywhere:
media agencies, media owners, technology companies--they are all getting involved and generating big ideas,
content and entertainment.
Like the rest of us, however, the creative agencies have to rid themselves of the arrogance that they can somehow
solve for all of the new realities on their own. At VivaKi, we took lessons from the software and other industries.
We considered how the Windows platform beat the Apple platform. And how VHS did away with Betamax.
Through open source development. Collaboration and partnership. We operate with the understanding that as
fast as we are moving, we can move even faster if we collaborate with other stakeholders who are trying to
accomplish what we are. We partner, exchange information, combine resources to maximize investments. We
build on each other's progress. We think it is a smarter service model to be an aggregator of scaled audiences
identified for their passions, and a builder of the pipelines that connect companies to those audiences in
meaningful, relevant ways.
AdExchanger.com: Where are the pain points today for holding companies looking to add and grow
"digital" in traditional media agencies? Is it better/easier to build a cross-channel media agency from the
ground-up?
DK: Inside most holding companies the pain points are talent gaps and silos.
The talent gap exists to some degree because we have a lot of brilliant talent that is highly skilled at jobs which we
should probably automate at this point in time. Plus we are vying for new talent which is in short supply and high
demand, inside and outside of our industry.
We need to invest in training, and we need to provide an employee value proposition that resonates with
tomorrow's talent. One of the primary constructs of VivaKi is the Talent and Transformation practice. It is built on
the concept of aggregated scale. Much like we combine our investment clout to leverage preferred pricing, we
also combine our training budgets, employee development practices and benefits to create a new proposition for
talent. Through agency collaboration we are facilitating fluid talent which gives people greater mobility and global
dexterity. We are building training modules and giving people more diverse experiences that give them more skills
ahead of the market. At the same time, we are also working to automate those parts of our business that can be
done more efficiently, so that we can repurpose talent to focus on innovation and invention.
Silos are also the nemesis of digital acceleration. Transformation is hard work, and it's made harder when
agencies compete for resources and dominance. Our approach has been to tear down the silos and facilitate
collaboration. With more people running in the same direction, we pick up speed and momentum. This is a huge
challenge for companies that have grown up competing for market share, new business and the right to lead. We
have had to change our behavior as well as our structure. We are sorting this out, and the faster we can move, the
faster our clients can move. We all need the benefits of reinvention.
Once the barriers for collaboration, holistic thinking and integration are addressed and weakened, it is much easier
to bring together successful teams and capabilities than it would be to build something from scratch.
Follow VivaKi (@vivaki) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
February 10, 2010 – 11:57 am’
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Former Mindshare CEO Scott Neslund Appointed Red
Bricks Media CEO; Discusses Digital Strategy
January 11, 2010 – 3:33 pm
The former CEO of WPP Group’s Mindshare and
President of Publicis Groupe/Starcom MediaVest
Group’s StarLink, Scott Neslund, has been named CEO
of Red Bricks Media, a search and performance
marketing agency. Read the release.
The allure of digital continues to draw top executives as
Neslund's appointment echoes last week's announcement that GroupM's new CEO would be their digital media
chief, Rob Norman.
AdExchanger.com spoke to Neslund about his new role, display advertising and the ad holding company world he
left behind.
AdExchanger.com: Given RBM's cross-channel aspirations, what do you see as the advantages of an
agency like Red Bricks Media with its digital roots in competing with traditional media agencies in areas
such as TV, newspaper or radio media buying?
SN: With media moving more into data rich digital formats, and with our background in data driven marketing, we
will be at a competitive advantage against agencies with a traditional/offline media planning approaches. We know
how to use digital data to target and market to consumers. Traditional media will always exist but we plan to be
experts in all the new digital forms of traditional media.
AdExchanger.com: Does RBM see display advertising as an opportunity? Any discussion around
leveraging the agency's search specialization to exploit data-driven demand-side platforms for display
advertising?
SN: Yes. With more display media going into technology driven ad exchanges and more display media going to
behavioral targeting, it is data driven marketers that will be in a great position to compete.
AdExchanger.com: What are your thoughts on the ad holding company model? What will it need to do
survive - or should it?
SN:Holding companies need to make sure that they keep their overhead costs down and don’t become just an
added expense to advertisers. Holding companies that break down functional silos to work for the benefit of clients
and keep overhead costs down will survive in the future. Those that don’t will have a tough time.
By John Ebbert
January 11, 2010 – 3:33 pm
13
Innovation Interactive Leveraging Dentsu To Expand
Search/Display Offering And More Says Co-CEO Margiloff
March 29, 2010 – 1:03 pm
Will Margiloff is Founder and co-CEO of Innovation Interactive, a
digital marketing services company owned by ad holding company,
Dentsu.
Can you share the progress being made with the integration
into Dentsu? Any unforeseen synergies being unlocked at this
early stage?
We are in the early stages of our deal so many of the opportunities
are just unfolding. Both Dentsu and Innovation Interactive’s core
business philosophies are very similar in that we put the client at
the center and develop services and solutions around their needs.
So some of the immediate opportunities we see involve offering
expanded services to Dentsu's customers across the digital
spectrum ranging from search/display management and attribution
technology, audience network offerings and agency solutions such
as paid search management and social media strategy.
Please discuss Innovation Interactive's DSP strategy.
First, we don’t believe that DSPs will save the world. DSPs will
definitively give agencies better control, transparency and data
collection capabilities where they didn’t have it before. But they will
not replace 100% of display inventory. There will always be room
for network buys with differentiated offerings whether that is unique
data used for targeting, vertical players or added capabilities such as advanced analytics as an offering on top of a
media buy.
We’ve been running a DSP in effect for several years at Innovation Interactive. We have all of the components -from a search optimization and attribution technology (DSSP-Demand Side Search Platform), to the necessary
hooks into the exchanges and direct inventory sources, to the data warehousing and application of that data to
optimize media spend and performance. With millions of clicks from $550 million in annual spend, $8 billion in
transactions and on-site behavioral information on millions of users (used only with permission from our clients),
our data is farther down the funnel and richer than most companies in the space. We also have a sizable in-house
media buying team that’s spent years buying on the exchanges and on an auction model. We’re far along in our
efforts in this area, which we began years ago because we saw efficient auction-based media capabilities as a
core and increasingly more important benefit to our clients. (use of the data is only done with permission from our
clients)
What's your view regarding exchange buying? Is it the next big thing? Can it "go global?"
It is definitely a U.S based phenomenon right now. We have offices in Japan (#2 market), UK (the #3 market) and
Brussels (Headquarters for our European operations). We don't see exchanges flourishing the way they are in the
U.S yet. We believe they will soon, so it’s critical that agencies build their DSP offerings in a flexible way for
international capabilities.
14
Do you see pricing models changing? Will cost per engagement become a standard?
On the performance display side, you’re going to continue to see CPM and CPA/rev share pricing. Just about
everyone agrees that CPC pricing is the wrong model for graphical ad units for branding. For video and rich media
advertising, you’ll see a combination of CPM and CPE. While CPE is appealing because you are paying for
performance, the effective CPMs can often be higher than marketers can bear. In those cases, they’d prefer to pay
on a CPM and optimize on a CPE.
In general, how do you see the media agency model evolving over the next 2-3 years?
Depends on the client objective. For brand work, I see a movement towards a fixed fee model based on a scope of
work, although commission based models will still be prevalent. For direct response objectives, we see a lot of
momentum towards pure or hybrid based agency compensation models where a material portion of the agency’s
compensation is based on exceeding definable ROI objectives. This model has both more risk and more reward for
the agency as the floor compensation is much lower but the agency is able to participate in upside value they
produce. Value based compensation aligns compensation between agencies, publishers and marketers.
Do you have a data strategy for Innovation Interactive? If so, can you share the broad strokes of it?
We have a rich set of proprietary data which we are warehousing and applying to the optimization of media. Our
search marketing optimization and media attribution technology SearchIgnite measures both PPC and SEO click
and conversion data, while our audience targeting platform Netmining gathers a wide variety of site analytics and
display click stream and conversion data. We also gather a variety of social and earned media data for clients
utilizing our digital and social planning capabilities. With all of this data, we’re focused on helping our clients
optimize and properly attribute performance to better understand how various media channels are working
together.
So we are better positioned than most companies due to the fact that our data is farther down the funnel and thus
more relevant and we own the proprietary technology that gathers it. We believe that leads to better transparency
and results for our clients. (use of the data is only done with permission from our clients)
Should agencies build and/or buy technology? Or should they just "rent"? What's Innovation Interactive's
view?
This is simple. It depends on their capabilities first and then their use and acceptance of technology. We believe it
is important to own the technology but that plays well with our client’s needs. There are other companies that focus
on other elements of a client’s needs and just don’t need to own the technology to be successful. An example of
this is an agency that does mainly creative with limited full-service clients. For a company like this, it might be
better for their business model and their clients to rent rather than own technology. It really is a DNA thing.
Follow Will Margiloff (@wmargiloff), Denstu America (@dentsu_america) and
AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 29, 2010 – 1:03 pm
15
Ad Networks & Exchanges
24/7 Real Media’s Pangis Looks At Her Company’s
Publisher Platform Solutions
March 11, 2010 – 9:32 am
24/7 Real Media announced an upgrade to its publisher ad serving
solution, Open AdStream this week. Read the release.
Nicolle Pangis, VP, Product Management Global Media and
Technology for 24/7 Real Media, reviewed Open AdStream and its
place in the publisher platform market.
AdExchanger.com: How is 24/7 and Open AdStream
addressing the need for publishers to unlock and manage the value of their data?
Since 24/7 Real Media’s inception and the initial release of the Open AdStream ad management technology
platform through to its current version, we have aligned with publisher interest to support and protect publishers’
valuable data.
24/7 Real Media has developed unique partnerships with other leading companies in the digital marketing industry
to distinctively integrate data and technology partners. For example, our partnership with Omniture produced a first
of its kind integration between Open AdStream and Omniture’s leading web analytics platform SiteCatalyst,
allowing publishers to leverage their own robust analytics data to define and target audience segments with
advertising messages.
Please discuss the competitive set. How are you differentiating from the competition?
Open AdStream is the premiere ad management platform in the marketplace today, enabling publishers to deliver
ads in any digital format to any digital platform including Web sites, mobile, IPTV and many emerging platforms.
Along with developing the technology platform itself, 24/7 Real Media has embraced the philosophy of an open
digital ecosystem, developing partnerships and integrations with other key players in the market in order to provide
customers with best-of-breed solutions. 24/7 Real Media’s ad management offering can also be differentiated by
the superior training, account management, and support teams that provide reliable and effective customer
service.
What's your view: are demand-side platforms (DSPs) a threat to publishers given their ability to target
audience across multiple supply sources?
Demand side platforms give advertisers the opportunity to obtain lower rates for publisher inventory and target
audiences across multiple publishers, networks and ad exchanges, which is not always in the publishers’ best
interest. Emerging DSPs and ad exchanges, along with various intermediaries such as yield optimizers, take a
piece of the value as publishers sell their audiences and inventory; however, the market is still nascent and the
technology and practices still developing. As these companies and business models evolve, there will likely be
some consolidation along the value chain allowing publishers to reclaim more value from their inventory.
Will 24/7 develop a supply-side platform (SSP)?
16
24/7 Real Media is aligned with publisher interest and therefore provides best-of-breed solutions for publishers to
manage their digital advertising and extract the greatest value from their inventory. In addition to the Open
AdStream ad management platform, 24/7 Real Media enables publishers to monetize their inventory with our
Global Web Alliance media network of Web sites across the globe. Aligning network and publisher goals, the
Global Web Alliance represents publisher inventory through direct one-to-one relationships, and is virtually the only
major network that does not purchase inventory.
By John Ebbert
March 11, 2010 – 9:32 am
17
Adconion Unveils New Joost Video Network, Positioning
For Video Platform Future
March 4, 2010 – 2:10 pm
Adconion announced the Joost Video Network today - "a complete
suite of online video advertising products and services... with
global in-banner and in- stream video advertising capabilities,
including pre-, mid- and post- roll video advertisements." (Read the
release.) The announcement comes a little over three months since
Adconion acquired Joost.
Nick Higgins, Adconion's director of global video, discussed the company's video ad network initiatives and Joost.
AdExchanger.com: What were the challenges involved in converting Joost into a video ad network? What
parts of Joost provided infrastructure - and what didn't?
NH: The main technical challenge was integrating the Adconion ad server in to the Joost player, which was key in
order to provide our advertisers both the ability to re-target users across pre-roll and display ads as well as provide
them with integrated reporting. Other than that, launching the Joost Video Network was pretty seamless, because
we could leverage our existing network capabilities - after all, we are the world's largest independent audience
network.
Discuss the video formats available in the Joost network. Have you looked to the VAST standard for
example as a guide? How do you seeing this playing out?
The Joost Video Network provides in-stream and in-banner video advertising. In our in-stream products, we have
pre-, mid- and post-roll ads, which we supplement with overlays, and we are VAST-compliant. For in-banner video
ads, we have an almost limitless number of products, based on the size of the ad and the way in which the video
starts playing. We have click-to-play and autostream video ads available in IAB-compliant sizes; we also have
click-to-play and autostream expandable video ads in IAB-compliant sizes.
Also, we feel it's important to note that our network is DoubleVerified, so every video ad that runs on the Joost
Video Network runs in a brand-safe environment.
From a sales standpoint, are you selling audience, placement, custom integrations?
We're selling all three. We are certainly selling audience, and are particularly excited about our ability to target
users using BlueKai data for both pre-roll and in-banner video ads. In addition, owning and operating our own
video portal, Joost.com, gives us the opportunity to develop cutting-edge custom integrations, where the brand can
own the video player. We also have an exclusive relationship with the branded entertainment studio RedLever,
which enables us to work with clients to create custom campaigns - which we then distribute through the Joost
Video Network.
A year from now, what goals would you like to see Joost to have already accomplished?
Adconion's goal is to position Joost as a leading content aggregation, distribution and monetization video platform so you can expect to see more announcements from us about our video products throughout the year.
By John Ebbert
March 4, 2010 – 2:10 pm
18
Adgregate Markets Releases ShopFans; CEO Wong Looks
At Display And Social Media
Email This Post
April 20, 2010 – 11:41 am
Today, Adgregate Markets announced ShopFans, which "allows
consumers to make secure purchase transactions directly in
Facebook." Read the release.
CEO Henry Wong discussed the new product and display's impact
on social media and visa versa.
AdExchanger.com: How does social media change display?
And how does it change e-commerce in display?
HW: If content and commerce are intimately tied to social networks/features in the future, then social media may
have a profound affect on traditional online display advertising in and out of Facebook. Display advertising in
Facebook, for example, doesn't allow for normal rich media advertising and doesn't follow the same form factors of
traditional publishers and IAB compliant ad units. By having a 'closed' network, Facebook can literally dictate how
display advertising is presented (or not presented as the case may be) to its users. That's why so many brand
dollars are creating customized 'display ads' within their sponsored and official brand pages. Outside of Facebook,
we're seeing ads with social tie-ins, and allow for users to become 'fans' through the engagement of the ad itself,
or utilize Facebook Connect to leave comments/reviews. In or out of Facebook, these ads are ultimately much
more viral and tie directly back into the social fabric of Facebook. Anytime you have a social tie-in within an ad unit,
we believe security and privacy of the user is tantamount, which we best solve through our consumer facing
trustmarks from McAfee (#1 security services) and TRUSTe (#1 privacy services).
Social media, of course, has a profound impact on transactional display ads and applications as well. Facebook
has overtaken Google now as the most visited site on the Internet. As more retailers look to woo would-be
shoppers, recent reports indicate that Facebook is by far the most effective way to turn conversations into
conversions. This trend will force retailers and brands to not only set up Facebook storefronts, but pro-actively run
marketing campaigns against their fanbase to measure the success of their social commerce strategies. ShopFans
is the first native Facebook built app which allows this nexus between brand, fan, and secure transactions to exist.
Can you give a use case of how ShopFans works? Please identify the client types this is good for.
Utilizing the world’s most secure social commerce technology available, ShopFans allows consumers to make
secure purchase transactions directly in Facebook without compromising security and privacy. Moreover,
ShopFans was built as a native Facebook application, which allows brands for the first time to tie directly into all of
the social plumbing of Facebook, including promotion through “Wish lists”, “I want this!”, “Likes”, “Shout outs”, gift
registries, private and exclusive sales, and more. ShopFans is the industry’s first ever fully secure, complete, and
native Facebook ecommerce application, which not only allows brands to chat directly with its fans, but also allows
fans to virally promote and share the brand’s message and products; all done through the social ‘hooks’ within
Facebook.
Our first publicly announced client is with celebrity fashion retailer StyleQ. Apparel is a great demonstration of the
power of social commerce, where you can mimic 'live' shopping experiences between friends: browse, shop, ask
friends for ideas or advice, get buy in from your peer groups, purchase on the spot, or list in an online gift
registry/wishlist for your loved ones to purchase. In order to be truly 'social,' you need much more than a 'storefront
in an iframe;' you need a holistic set of options/tools which are tied directly into the social plumbing of Facebook
itself. Beyond apparel, any brand or set of products which have existing fan allegiance make great showcases of
19
ShopFans. You'll see some of our major studio and gaming clients go live with ShopFans next. (See StyleQ’s
ShopFans storefront.)
What do you see as the opportunity for Adgregate Markets with ShopFans? Can it drive double-digit
revenues for the company a year from now, for example?
Social commerce is white hot, and the demand for a truly social commerce solution like ShopFans is exploding.
The opportunity is easy math: The 'destination' ecommerce marketplace today is about $200 billion, and while
Facebook has overtaken Google as the most trafficked site on the web, barely any brands have set up actual
storefronts on Facebook. If only 1% of ecommerce dollars shift toward social commerce, that's a $2 billion market
overnight. Building a double digit revenue company within this marketplace would only be a small fraction of even
that. Adgregate is ultimately a seller of picks and shovels, and anyone wanting social commerce will have to ask at
some point who has the best product out there? With our proprietary technology endorsed by security and privacy
heavyweights McAfee and TRUSTe enabling 100% secure checkout within Facebook, and our growing ecosystem
with leading ad networks and ecommerce solution vendors, and now our new truly social commerce solution
ShopFans, we believe we are in the best position to capture overall market growth in this area.
By John Ebbert
April 20, 2010 – 11:41 am
20
PointRoll Gets Ecommerce And Adgregate Markets In Its
Media
April 2, 2010 – 9:05 am
Adgregate Markets announced a new partnership with rich media
advertising provider, PointRoll, which will embed Adgregate's Shop
Ads e-commerce technology within PointRoll ads. Read the
release.
Adgregate Markets CEO Henry Wong discussed the partnership
and its attribution capabilities.
How does the integration work of Adgregate Markets
technology into PointRoll technology?
Adgregate’s suite of APIs and code libraries provides seamless integration with Pointroll’s AdPortal to allow the
creation of distributed commerce-enabled rich media ads. Pointroll’s entire rich media solution suite now has the
ability bring in Adgregate’s proprietary ecommerce capabilities in a rapid manner in both online and mobile rich
media ads.
Can we expect more of these kinds of deals where rich media providers like PointRoll look to Adgregate
Markets for eCommerce functionality in their media?
Absolutely. We are already partnered with the top 4 rich media ad vendors, including Doubleclick, Eyewonder,
Eyeblaster, and now Pointroll too. We believe any rich media provider, from social apps to rich media ads, could
benefit from Adgregate’s secure, turnkey distributed commerce functionality.
How is the revenue opportunity structured between the two companies?
As with all our preferred partners, Pointroll is on a special pricing structure that allows them to bring a competitively
priced distributed commerce solution to their clients. The pricing structure is geared to meet the needs of individual
clients and their programs and is priced on a CPM basis.
How is attribution being managed for the client? Does Adgregate Markets or PointRoll help?
Previously, rich media ads could not track and report on consumer behavior within the
walled garden of a retailer’s secure catalog and shopping cart. Now, through Adgregate's ShopAds, advertisers for
the first time can replicate the entire secure shopping experience within a portable ad unit; allowing safe and
reliable transmission of data between advertisers and partners. These new conversion metrics ‘kick in’ where
purchase intent metrics have traditionally left off, all within the secure catalog or cart.
Through this partnership, the new set of rich data available to advertisers includes secure product catalog and cart
interactions, dwell times and rates, add-to-cart and abandonment rates, and actual sales conversions. This
combined data allows marketers to understand what causes purchase intent and the triggers required for purchase
conversion.
By John Ebbert
April 2, 2010 – 9:05 am
21
Adgregate Markets Announces ShopFans, Gives Exclusive
First Look To IPG’s Emerging Media Labs
March 12, 2010 – 9:29 am
Adgregate Markets announced a partnership with IPG
Mediabrands' Emerging Media Lab unit today which will make
Adgregate Markets a preferred technology provider within IPG.
According to the release, "IPG will promote Adgregate products
and services to the Interpublic agency network." Part of the deal
includes Adgregate Markets new socially-infused "ShopFans" in
banner, e-commerce technology. Read more.
CEO Henry Wong of Adgregate Markets discussed the IPG announcement and the new product line.
AdExchanger.com: What provided the spark for creating ShopFans?
HW: Consumer usage of Facebook is exploding. The driving force was initially communication and content sharing
among friends, but now brands and retailers are joining the conversation and often promoting special offers to their
fans. For example, a recent report by ForeSee says that, of the 69% of online shoppers who are social media
users, 56% have chosen to "friend," "follow," or "subscribe to" at least one store brand on Facebook. Another
report commissioned by Opinion Research Corporation and Yesmail found that nearly half (45%) of survey
respondents use social networks to research items, compare prices, and look for offers.
What's social about ShopFans?
We're keeping the features hush-hush for now until launch, and only our closest partners know what to expect. It
will literally mark the beginning of true social shopping on Facebook. Stay tuned.
An agency holding company deal is a bit of a "holy grail" in the industry. How do you manage the potential
needs of a company much larger than you?
That's a great challenge to be facing. Staffing up to meet a growing pipeline of clients is a top priority.
Can you quantify what you expect the impact on Adgregate Markets will be this year and/or next? Is their
exclusivity with the IPG deal?
IPG is getting an exclusive "first look" at some of the ShopFans innovations to be launched next month and we'll
be working closely with key clients to solicit feedback during the initial launch period. We expect their clients will
enjoy this head start.
Regarding impact, we expect 2010 to be our best year ever.
By John Ebbert
March 12, 2010 – 9:29 am
22
Advertisers Overlaying Third-Party Data On Vertical Ad
Networks Today Says Adify CEO Fradin
February 2, 2010 – 6:03 pm
Adify released a survey of media planner and agencies today that
looked at the importance of ad networks in online media buys and
found that "branding has become the top priority for online campaigns
as compared to direct response. Read the release.
CEO Russ Fradin spoke to AdExchanger.com about the results of the
survey and audience buying as it relates to vertical ad networks.
AdExchanger.com: Your survey shows that targeting niche
audiences remains a popular driver in using vertical ad
networks (VANs). Are clients asking to buy audience more
efficiently from vertical ad networks these days?
Vertical Ad Networks bring insight and expertise regarding the
interests of their vertical’s audience as well as appropriate, quality,
vertical-appropriate content. As consultative, premium sellers,
Network Builders, using Adify’s Network Builder platform, overlay third party data sources easily if desired for the
campaign.
That said, advertisers recognize that the right person in the right place at the right time is the winning combination.
The data overlay helps specify the right person while the vertical ad network contributes to that identification as
well as delivering the place and time.
AdExchanger.com: Can you see a day when vertical ad networks become vertical audience networks and
begin corralling audience through exchanges, aggregators (yield optimizers) and networks to meet the
scale requirements of a client's particular audience? Or, is that a step too far for the VAN?
ComScore, Dynamic Logic and more have shown that consumers respond to compelling creative delivered at the
right time and in the right place. There is no technology comparable to human expertise at identifying quality
content and design. Exchanges and aggregators will play a significant role in reach and reinforcement of the
message, but vertical ad networks create opportunities for branding, engagement and long term relationships
between brands and their best prospects.
AdExchanger.com: If creative is "50 to 75 percent responsible for campaign success or failure" as you say
in the release, how does or should a VAN help make creative more effective?
RF: The builders of vertical ad networks are subject matter experts who bet their brands, reputations and
businesses on their understanding of their vertical and selection of quality, on-target publishers. Because of their
relationship with the publishers and their insights into their markets, they can and do advise advertisers on how to
speak with and engage targeted consumers. In this advisory role, Network Builders can “stack the deck” in
selecting, tuning and delivering the most compelling creative to the most receptive audience.
By John Ebbert
February 2, 2010 – 6:03 pm
23
AdRoll CEO Bell Discusses Self-Service Retargeting
January 28, 2010 – 2:08 am
AdRoll announced a new, self-service retargeting solution which it says has resulted in up to a 30% performance
improvement when buying cross-platform. Read the release.
AdRoll CEO Aaron Bell spoke with AdExchanger.com about the
new product called Roundtrip and retargeting, in general.
AdExchanger.com: You identify "cross-platform retargeting"
(i.e. retargeting across multiple ad networks and exchanges)
in the release as the reason for a 30% lift for AdRoll advertiser
clients retargeting campaigns. How do you manage the
client's cookie pool? Do you prevent duplication across the
supply sources? And what about frequency capping?
On the surface, retargeting is advertising to past visitors as they surf the web at large. However, besides merely
targeting a specific user, there are additional factors that need to be layered in, such as context (ads perform 36%
better in context*), location of ad on the page, and bid price. The broader the inventory set you can see, the more
experiments you can run to exploit these factors, and the better you can optimize. Cross-platform retargeting
affords RoundTrip this flexibility, and we see greatly improved lift when we blend campaigns versus buying on a
sole platform.
This is the (now being realized) power of real-time bidding. We are rolling out RTB buying with partners that have
mature APIs, while mixing in pixel piggybacking with the systems that haven't reached that point yet. Alongside,
we've developed a cookie store that lets us recognize users across inventory pools and apply appropriate
frequency caps. Our partner integrations are at various stages, but we're excited to see very strong retargeting
campaign lift today purely as a result of cross-platform buying.
* Source: Enquiro Research, "Display Advertising - Does Contextual Relevancy Make a Difference", August 2008.
AdExchanger.com: What would you say the key differences are between the retargeting needs of the small
advertiser and large advertisers such as eCommerce players and agencies?
AB: Our overall approach to SMBs is easy DIY tools coupled with support (a live person that can help), and highlyautomated optimization technology that reduce the overhead of running a successful campaign. These attributes,
in addition to our focus on performance and reach, have also made us attractive to the larger e-commerce
advertisers and agencies.
AdExchanger.com: If one of the exchanges or networks, such as DoubleClick Ad Exchange, was able to
scale and capture a significant amount of your clients' audiences, would they need multiple supply
sources anymore for retargeting?
AB: Based on the data we’ve seen, a cross-platform solution provides better performance. (Incidentally, the
DoubleClick Ad Exchange is one of the platforms that we already make available to our advertisers.) There will
always be more optimization opportunities from being able to sample more inventory.
By John Ebbert
January 28, 2010 – 2:08 am
24
Germany’s AdScale Expecting Revenues To Double In
2010 Says CEO Pantke
February 19, 2010 – 10:20 am
Matthias Pantke is CEO of AdScale GmbH, an online advertising
marketplace based in Germany,
AdExchanger.com: Give us a bit of background on you and how
it's prepared you as well as the evolution of AdScale's business
model - which has been around for a few years, correct?
My career started at DSF in 1997 (the German equivalent of ESPN).
In 2000, I joined the KirchGruppe in 2000 where I was responsible for
the digital sales channels and the business development of (at that
time) new business models like search, performance marketing or
rights licensing. In 2005, I joined TradeDoubler, the European market
leader for performance and affiliate marketing where I was
responsible for the D-A-CH Market.
Today I am CEO of AdScale, Germany's leading marketplace for
online advertisement. Before I joined the company in January of
2008, I had already invested in AdScale at its beginning in April 2007
when the first financing took place. At that time, I consulted with one
of the investors, Oliver Samwer, o. a. Founder of Ebay Germany and
jamster. Already in 2004, I had noted early US-trading models and
marketplaces with the objective of founding AdScale with the current
investors. Due to the lack of market size and a missing fragmentation
on the demand- and supply-side, we postponed it until April 2007.
From your standpoint, how is online display advertising different in Germany or Europe than in the U.S.?
And, any differences in the way exchanges and ad networks are viewed?
The European markets are very similar to the U.S.. We, also, have high fragmentation on the buy and sell side in
online display advertising even though a large portion of the 1.2 billion Euro netto market (based on the German
OVK Online Report 2010/01) is agency driven (e.g. WPP, Omnicom, Aegis). In Germany we have more than 300
(!) AdNetworks and more than 10.000 display buyers. AdScale is aggregating both parts, transparent and open to
all.
The direct advertiser business is still growing fast and search-driven. But, display advertising via marketplaces gets
more and more traction in that area as well because of its search analogy on bidding, targeting possibilities and
attractive pricings. Over 75 Percent of our current 1.200 campaigns per month run on an average CPC of 50
Eurocent or less, even if the traffic is bought on CPM basis.
AdScale optimization technologies, like our auto CTR algorithms, are very attractive for advertisers. The auction
model is also a compelling value proposition for Publishers which makes it easier for them to adjust their supply to
the demand of the market. The Yield Management of AdScale is already comparable to big players like Admeld,
PubMatic or Rubicon Project.
What momentum have you seen at AdScale in the past year? Any challenges?
25
AdScale has recorded impressive eight-digit revenue in 2009. We have achieved the break-even point and are
profitable one year after the start of the operative business. For 2010, we assume a further increase in sales and,
at least, expect a doubling of the existing sales levels. For the German market we expect in the coming year a
tripling of the market share of all booked online advertising campaigns via AdExchange from five to 15 percent. As
the market leader, we will be able to benefit disproportionately from this increase.
Discuss the transparency you provide advertisers and publishers through your exchange? How does
AdScale make revenue?
Our commission is 30 Percent on Publishers revenues. As a marketplace for online advertising the pricing in our
system is fair and transparent for both sides. For publishers this means that they can control over AdScale their
prices independently and effectively. The price level can always be adjusted according to the efficiency of the
advertising space. Therefore, marketers are having the full control over each campaign and at what price it is
running. Thus, the average price level in our marketplace reflects the actual price level of the German online
advertising market.
How are you making the case for brand advertisers to make use of AdScale's exchange?
Adscale offers all customers a full transparency on where their ads are running and prohibits all kind of blind traffic.
In addition we conduct regular checks to prevent e.g. click fraud and IP locking. The passing through of tags is, of
course, also forbidden. The flexible pricing system, especially on secondary premium inventory, is another
advantage that is particularly important for brand advertisers.
AdScale is also open for all 3rd party technologies like behavioural- or re-targeting. The live auction system
ensures real time bidding and frequenzy capping limits the number of advertising contacts which is especially
important for video advertising, which we now have in our portfolio. Last but not least, the reach of AdScale is more
than convincing: today as we can achieve more than two-thirds (62.4 Percent, ComScore January 2010) of all
German internet users which means that we are second behind Google now after AOL gave up.
Has a secondary channel developed in Europe? In other words, is inventory still thought of as either
premium or remnant - or has a new channel been added in between?
Traffic segmentation is the key for publishers because two channels are definitely not enough. Basically, premium
networks and direct sales channels are focused on high-priced, often conceptually-driven business in the branding
area - as seen in the U.S. market. And marketers who follow neither a technical nor a premium approach and
therefore offer no real value will lose their clients.
The collaboration with marketers and networks as a complement to our services is completely possible. Today, we
are selling roughly 30 Percent on first and second level AAA publishers, 40 Percent on secondary premium and 30
Percent on longtail, social and user generated content. But the eCPMs differ a lot. From 300 million active
impressions we are currently selling 50 Percent of the inventory, the rest is going back to the publisher as a backfill
option.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
February 19, 2010 – 10:20 am
26
Unleashing The AOL Display Ad Beast: Ad Desk And
Display Strategy With AOL’s Fellows, Jacobs and Kennedy
April 26, 2010 – 12:07 am
Last week, AOL, owners of the Advertising.com ad network,
announced Ad Desk, the company's new, self-service platform for
ad buying across the Advertising.com network and AOL properties.
Read the release.
AdExchanger.com interviewed AOL execs Dave Jacobs (SVP,
Publisher Services), Don Kennedy (SVP, Network Sales) and
Jamie Fellows (VP, Product Management, AOL Advertising) in
regards to the Ad Desk launch and AOL's display ad strategy.
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AOL’s New Ad Desk
Ad Desk Differentation
The Decoupling Of Data And Media
Appending Data In Ad Desk
Ad Desk’s Target Market and Targeting Capabilities
Real-Time Bidding
Demand-Side Platforms And Technical Challenges
Bidding And Ad.com’s Network
The Future For Ad Desk
On AOL’s New Ad Desk
AdExchanger.com: Should we think of the new Ad Desk as a demand-side platform?
Dave Jacobs: The way I would think about it is, this is really the on-ramp to AOL Advertising and accessing that
inventory in a new way. We talk a lot about the demand-side platform, as others do, but what we don't want to do
is sort of characterize it or limit it in any way, around a particular business model.
We're viewing this as the way for advertisers, mid-size advertisers and agencies, to have the access and control if
we're buying on AOL, and the Advertising.com Network, that they never had before - leverage targeting,
retargeting, behaviors, and do things that we've not provided, from an access standpoint, across the
Advertising.com and the AOL businesses, previously.
We think this is a great starting point to do a lot more in the platform space. We're really looking closely at
everything that's happening out there right now. Mostly we're listening to our advertising and agency partners, to
help drive the requirements.
Don Kennedy: All three of us have been on the ad.com business for around 10 years now. If you look at it over
the years, one of the knocks on the networks was always the black box or blind network, if you will –“we're not
getting a lot of insight from you guys.” It was a one-way communication in many cases.
Where we really want to go is to be able to put a little bit more control into a subset of advertisers' hands to
manage their business, to grow their business, to have access to a lot of the same, down the road, a lot of the
same reporting and insights that we use on a day-to-day basis to drive our business. We really want to start to
externalize that quite a bit. And Ad Desk is a step in that direction, a pretty big step at that.
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On Ad Desk Differentation
AdExchanger.com: What is the true differentiation here? Beyond access to AOL inventory and the ad network.
Don Kennedy: Jamie, do you want to touch on that from a product perspective? -And then we can also touch on
what this version is versus where we want to go in 12 to 18 months or so.
Jamie Fellows: Right, I think that last bit is the key that we want to touch on at the end.
We feel we're bringing a broader set of solutions to the table, just because we've been in the business for a longer
period of time. And so, at its onset, we look to externalize a broader set of capabilities. This first beta launch really
is focused around providing advertisers and agencies access to AOL media properties and also the
Advertising.com Network as well as our core capabilities from AOL Advertising: direct access and control. It's
about finding audiences that scale across the largest network. And it's about creating a tool which is simple for
advertisers to understand and providing a base platform for us to grow from.
We’ve worked with advertisers on this, built it from the ground up, and we're focusing just on the display ad market.
We're looking to get feedback from more advertisers and agencies, as we build it going forward.
AdExchanger.com: So, in terms of plans for the roll-out, when is this going to be live?
Jamie Fellows: It's live currently. The announcement that we put out [last Monday – 4/19] was, we were live actually, well, before that - and bringing on new advertisers and new agencies for us to work with. So, that was a
focus around the release around ad:tech San Francisco. So, we can develop more advertiser relationships and
start to get more feedback from an additional set of advertisers.
AdExchanger.com: How does one sign up?
Jamie Fellows: It's simple, as you go to addesk.com, or addesk.advertising.com and there's a Sign Up Now link.
It's a self-registration site with credit card capabilities to buy advertising across AOL Advertising.
Don Kennedy: What we're trying to do is provide services that scale to a new portion of the market. Last year, we
worked with 91 of the top 100 Ad Age advertisers. That's a big number. We're very proud to have those
relationships as well as our agency relationships.
But, if you look at that next set of advertisers down the list in terms of spend, it typically was not an area where
Advertising.com focused its time. And a lot of that was just resource-based. It was how we went to market, a very
"direct sales"-type approach versus having a high-level of external automation. This is an opportunity for us to be
able to provide those services to a new market.
On The Decoupling Of Data And Media
AdExchanger.com: Stepping back a little bit, what's your view on the emergence of this platform-based buying
world and the idea of decoupling data from media? For example, companies like BlueKai and eXelate now exist
and are providing value outside of media.
Dave Jacobs: If you look back over three, four years of what Ad.com did, we had the ability to buy inventory in a
lot of different ways. But, we were one of the few people who could actually bulk buy our way through the industry
and buy a lot of volume at scale. And as the industry changed, over the last four years, what we've done is shifted
our model more around looking at three segments of inventory.
1. We have AOL inventory that sits in our network.
2. We have purchased inventory that we buy through proprietary partnerships or through direct partnerships.
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3. And then we have real-time bided or real-time acquired inventory.
We're playing across all those access points. Our real objective is to be as good or better than the industry in all
those access points to inventory so that we can continue to provide advertisers with broad solutions.
And then when you think about it from a decoupling standpoint, I think the objective is to allow advertisers to bring
their own data, if they want to, and still be able to service that. But, I think what we have a great opportunity to
focus on the data and insights that we do provide, that are proprietary, and really add value - not just the value that
you can get from BlueKai, or by plugging into somebody else.
We're happy to take that data and leverage it on behalf of an advertiser. Those are good solutions, and we're going
to do that as well as anybody. But, if all anybody wants to do is access inventory through those types of data
layers, we can absolutely do that. I think one of the things - and I'll let Don touch on it - that we do a really good job
of is laying the proprietary data and insights on top of that.
Don Kennedy: We try to be really open and flexible. I did a talk on our data strategy a week and a half ago or so
at a partner summit that we had in New York, and that was one of the things, thematically, we really wanted to get
across was, look, we are very flexible.
I think, to your point, you bring up BlueKai, those folks. There's been a lot of good innovation in the space. And so
we'd be foolish not to make sure that we maintain a level of flexibility with our agencies and advertisers, to say,
hey, here's what we've got. We've got 60 million addressable households that we've got data on. We've got this set
of data, that set of data, but if you want to bring in a third party, because you think there's something cool that
somebody's bringing to the table, then let's do it. And let's try and make it additive to the overall campaign that
we're running with you guys.
We are aggressively on the lookout for new stuff. And making sure we can integrate quickly and properly with
these folks.
Jamie Fellows: The decoupling of media and data has provided us opportunity for some new and interesting
partnerships. At the same time (and from the product perspective), I really want to focus and make sure it brings
value to the advertiser and show them through our own data insights what we can provide them on top of the
individual buy they're doing. That will be a core focus for our future iterations of Ad Desk: provide a lot more
information to the advertisers about their buy, and then tying that back to what they can actually buy off the site.
On Appending Data In Ad Desk
AdExchanger.com: Are you allowing buyers today to append data, such as some BlueKai or eXelate data, to do
their buy across AOL and the ad network through Ad Desk?
Jamie Fellows: We currently actually do it external to Ad Desk. Through Ad Desk right now, it's not necessarily
directly through the interface. You can buy - it could be aggregated data from one of those sources, but it's not
necessarily picking and choosing directly BlueKai or eXelate as a partner.
Dave Jacobs: Jamie, I believe that's on the roadmap, right, from a plug-in standpoint.
Jamie Fellows: It is. I think one of the biggest challenges, too, is making it really understandable and usable to the
advertisers so they understand what exactly they're getting and what the value is. But, that's obviously something
that's a core fundamental on the roadmap. We have a lot of those partnerships already. It's a matter of how do I
really expose it in a way that makes sense through the UI.
Fundamentally, too, I would say we've really tried to make the UI simple and easy to understand. We have a much
larger team here than we've had in the past of UI developers. We also have a bunch of designers focused on the
site.
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On Ad Desk’s Target Market and Targeting Capabilities
AdExchanger.com: Who is an ideal client right now for Ad Desk?
Dave Jacobs: Where we're going after is smaller to mid-size agencies right now and advertisers. Right now it's
CPM and CPC buyers. The next version - or the version after - of Ad Desk will have CPA capabilities as well.
We want to open it up to a lot of folks, but at the same time we want to still maintain the same consultative sales
relationship that we have with the top 10 advertisers.
There will be elements of Ad Desk that they can use as well, but right now it's more set up for that next level down.
The minimums are much smaller, so we're talking about a minimum of $100 a day, or $3000 a month.
AdExchanger.com: Do you provide above-the-fold targeting through Ad Desk yet?
Jamie Fellows: As an explicit targeting, we do not. Dave, do you want to talk about maybe from a publisher
services side what we're going to purchase?
Dave Jacobs: A lot of the buying that we do, to be honest, we do a lot of work just very focused on scrubbing the
placements, really making sure that if things are in line with content and in line with articles. Nothing below the
folds is really core to our network. That's not to say that things don't get through, but we're very focused on having
this above-the-fold placement experience for our advertisers.
AdExchanger.com: Is Ad Desk now wrapping in BidPlace and LeadBack? Those two are gone, right?
Jamie Fellows: Correct. Before we had BidPlace, and I know you've covered them pretty extensively, so BidPlace
Pro and BidPlace SB. Ad Desk is the one solution for purchasing AOL advertising.
On Real-Time Bidding
AdExchanger.com: Do you have any plans for enabling real-time bidding through the Ad Desk?
Dave Jacobs: I think a lot of what we're doing right now, and Jamie, feel free to jump in, but we're really talking to
our advertisers and agencies to figure out what they're looking for in the next generation of solutions. We have a lot
of the real-time bidding capabilities that we think we do as good as anybody in history. It's just a question of how
that evolves from a business relationship standpoint with our own advertisers.
We've been pretty tactical over the last two years about focusing on being able to execute real-time bidding. We
actually haven't done a lot of talking about real-time bidding in the marketplace because we've really viewed it as a
means to an end, to get inventory effectively for our advertisers. We've been at the very forefront and probably
doing as much of this at scale as anybody. We've been early-stage implementers with all the major exchanges,
and we've put a tremendous amount of resources...
AdExchanger.com: That's buying, though, right?
Dave Jacobs: On the buy side, yes. In terms of enablement of buyers coming into AOL, that's part of what we're
talking to our clients about which will help drive the future roadmap based on collective feedback from our
advertiser and agency clients.
AdExchanger.com: Would you say real-time bidding will happen at some point, or it's just still under discussion?
Jamie Fellows: I would say direct bidding on AOL advertising will happen at some point. It's a matter of
understanding when. We've heard and seen more demand probably in the beginning of this year than what we saw
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at all last year, and really understand ourselves to be one of the bigger buyers in this space, or more active ones.
We've heard of more people asking for it than early on in 2010, so it will happen. It's a matter of figuring out when
is it appropriate within the overall roadmap from a technology-product standpoint.
AdExchanger.com: What about margins? Are you going to be transparent about margins in the Ad Desk? I'm
just thinking from a buyer's perspective. Given the exchange model today, people understand 20 percent margins,
five percent, whatever the exchange is.
Dave Jacobs: On the Ad Desk today, what you get is you get information on what it will cost you as a buyer to
access the inventory. There is no information disclosed about margins.
On Demand-Side Platforms And Technical Challenges
AdExchanger.com: Where do demand-side platforms fit into AOL inventory today? How do they buy from AOL
and Ad.com today? Is the Ad Desk a solution for a DSP today, or will it be?
Don Kennedy: The short answer is that for the most part they're not accessing that inventory at all right now.
There have been some tests that we have run in certain cases where some of the DSPs have come to us through
agencies or through advertisers. We're talking to all those folks. We have some strong ideas on where the next
iteration of this network and of our offering goes. Currently, they're not accessing that through anything really or
through an Ad Desk.
At this point, Jamie, we've pretty much said that we're not going to work with them through that right now. But,
those conversations are going on on how we work together or whether we work together.
AdExchanger.com: So, one of the complaints I've heard out there about working more with BidPlace than AOL
is just about the complexity and the difficulty of it. Maybe a two part question, does Ad Desk in part help solve this,
address this problem? Then, what are you doing maybe in more full-service aspects to address that problem, if you
agree it's a problem?
Jamie Fellows: Obviously, we want it to be a simple solution, if you will, for people to work with. So, what we've
done with Ad Desk addresses any concerns people may have had because it was built from the ground up.
Basically, we completely rebuilt the user experience. We want to partner with advertisers and agencies at our side
rebuilding the capabilities and think Ad Desk should address any concerns - if there were concerns - associated
with BidPlace. That's really what we're looking for it to provide.
This is where fundamentally advertising.com is not just a network, but it's really the technology platform for AOL
moving forward. Ad Desk is one of the first external elements that we're showing where we're building the core
fundamental technologies for the organization.
Dave Jacobs: Holistically, and talking from a full-service perspective, I think you look at that, as I referenced
earlier, that black box sort of mentality over the years. If you're perceived as being guarded with data and services,
are you perceived as being easy to work with? That's one of those things that we want to continue to externalize a lot of what we've continue to work on internally over the years is to make it incredibly efficient and easy to work
with us.
On Bidding And Ad.com’s Network
AdExchanger.com: Are Ad Desk users bidding on the same inventory as ad.com is bidding on?
Dave Jacobs: Yes and effectively these are just additional advertisers in the inventory ecosystem.
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AdExchanger.com: In terms of ad.com's ability to bid on non-guaranteed inventory versus the Ad Desk buyer,
how do you manage that?
Dave Jacobs: If you think about AdLearn and our scheduling approach, we're really looking at trying to line up the
highest in value opportunities. So, if you as a buyer are buying a particular channel of AOL on a non-reserved
basis, the criteria that you are setting for that buy will be valued appropriately in line with any other buys that have
the opportunity to schedule in that same intersection, whether it's inventory plus user inventory plus user plus geo,
whatever that combination is, you as the buyer are competing on the same field as any other buyer. So, we almost
don't view ad.com as separate from Ad Desk buyers. They're really just different campaigns that are sitting in the
non-reserved space. Some of that happens to be AOL-only inventory, some of its across our hundreds and
hundreds of sites.
On The Future For Ad Desk
AdExchanger.com: What can you tell me about the next 18 months? –such as mobile inventory, video inventory,
addressing the agency buying desks, etc.
Dave Jacobs: Jamie, why don't you touch on the product roadmap side of things, as far as the 18 months kind of
thing goes, and then I'll talk about the trading desks and more.
Jamie Fellows: A big focus for us is providing data insights for reporting into the tool and providing a lot more
information, so to really open ourselves up to the advertiser. We have a really valuable commodity for the
advertiser from that standpoint. As we expose that, we really feel that we can broaden the use of the tool to all our
advertisers versus just the people that are coming through from a self-registration model or a self-service model. It
becomes a very valid tool for all the advertisers that we have within AOL Advertising. That's a huge focus for us.
The other side that we really will build out tremendously through here will be performance and going back so that
becomes core toAd Desk from a performance standpoint. Those are probably two of the biggest areas.
The last one is really we're opening ourselves up to get more feedback from advertisers, and we have set aside
development time on the product roadmap to really incorporate that feedback and build the tool up for advertisers.
Dave Jacobs: As it pertains to the holding companies in general, and the trading desks in particular, I gave a
presentation at our partner summit conference recently about data. We're starting to show some of the examples
of the types of reporting that we are providing the advertisers on a limited basis right now, but it's the kind of stuff
that over the years we've used internally to map our business out from day one.
The response from some of the trading desk and holding company folks was great. They came up that night and
said, "We would love to be able to automate this and be able to incorporate it into what we're doing."
We're constantly talking to the agency buying desk and we're trying to make sure that we find the best fit to work
together. We work with all of them and we're working with 99 out of the top 100 advertisers.
Now, it's just a question of technology, and integration and what do we want to do. We historically haven't been a
licensing business, so that's a little bit of a shift in the model. The short answer is that we will be working with the
agency buying desks in some fashion or another.
AdExchanger.com: How does Ad Desk fit within AOL's new strategy as a content provider? Really, given the
content provider/publisher strategy, why not just make AOL inventory available on exchanges versus building
something proprietary?
Jamie Fellows: The answer is that we're focused on content and monetizing that content. We need to be
responsible for the monetization of the content that we're providing and not just open it up to another party to have
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control over that. But, fundamentally, we need to develop a profitable content business. We need to build and
partner, where appropriate, to monetize AOL as best we can.
AdExchanger.com: Is this something all publishers need to do – maybe the largest web publishers? If these
publishers want to effectively understand their inventory, and monetize it properly, they're going to need to build
their own tools.
Dave Jacobs: There's an economic question of scale, certainly, such as the costs: can you plug into a tool that
you own versus leveraging an exchange? There are many different strategies that publishers are doing every
single day right now. This is really just a question of scale. AOL is in this position because of its size and the scale,
and the vision of continuing to grow to drive more page views, to continue to drive more and engage users. The
opportunity from a monetization standpoint is integral to our long-term strategy.
By John Ebbert
April 26, 2010 – 12:07 am
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Former US Search CEO Jeff Pullen On His New Role At
Audience Science
April 13, 2010 – 8:28 am
In addition to joining its board, Jeff Pullen has been hired as
President and COO of AudienceScience, the company announced.
Read the release.
Pullen discussed his new role and recent experience in the online
advertising economy.
AdExchanger.com: Where do you begin when putting together a company's strategic roadmap? In
regards to creating AudienceScience's roadmap, where do you begin?
JP: I have worked with many companies at various stages of their development, and my experience has taught me
that the approach is similar regardless of the size of the company. You start with a critical assessment of
strengths, weaknesses opportunities and threats. Communicating directly with the team and compiling the
collective experience of the organization, usually leads to a pretty clear path to pursue. I am joining
AudienceScience in the middle of a period of significant growth, so I’m looking for what I can do to continue to
drive that growth, with primary focus on the internal processes and resources necessary to scale. Jeff Hirsch as
CEO handles the outward expansion efforts. I’m beginning by assessing the needs of the various teams here—
technology and development, marketing, business intelligence, operations --to find out what resources I can
provide them to maintain their current upward momentum.
Given your CEO experience at US Search, one might conclude that AudienceScience will be targeting the
search market. Will it? And, why is search marketing a good fit for platforms which enable audience
buying through display advertising?
US Search is only my most recent engagement. I have held executive positions in several different industries and
my most relevant experience is in online marketing, having served as CEO and COO two well-known players in
ValueClick and Commission Junction. But, I’ve been working in the Internet space since 1998 and my early career
was in consulting so I’ve developed solid skills in helping drive success in many companies.
As online audience buying continues to evolve and mature, when do you expect to see larger, brand
dollars to move online?
We’re already in the midst of that shift pattern, and based on the record growth AudienceScience has seen, that
trend shows no signs of slowing. The larger brands are looking for straightforward execution and demonstrated
value, which audience targeting has been able to show. A recent NAI study found that targeted advertising leads to
higher conversions than standard run of network ads. As media continues to converge and the number of digital
opportunities available increases, we have significant growth potential.
By John Ebbert
April 13, 2010 – 8:28 am
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AudienceScience CEO Hirsch Discusses Publisher
Platform, Ad Network
March 18, 2010 – 1:55 pm
AudienceScience announced that media companies Hearst,
Discovery, Scripps, and BBC Worldwide among others are using its
publisher platform. Hearst notes that it is using the platform in order
to enable audience segmentation for direct sales. Read the
release.
AudienceScience CEO Jeff Hirsch discussed the publisher
platform, its features and positioning for the client.
Please discuss The Audience Gateway for Publishers - what problem is it solving for publishers?
Publishers leverage The Audience Gateway as their integrated audience targeting platform enabling them to
generate new revenue streams by selling audience targeted campaigns on their premium inventory to advertisers
on their web sites or across the AudienceScience Network. Unlike alternative solutions, the platform gives
publishers complete control to both create the audiences that advertisers demand and create new ways to sell
their data and inventory. Publishers can choose from a menu of options for defining audiences, with instant real
time reporting on the size and attributes of those audiences. As part of the AudienceScience Network, publishers
have access to additional buyers and sellers of data and inventory. As a result, publishers can create valuable
audiences that drive higher rates and increased sales.
By using this product, are these client publishers part of the AudienceScience ad network too?
We enable publishers to choose how they work with us, with customizable solutions to fit their needs. Not all of our
publishers participate in our network, some use our platform only to enable them to offer audience targeting on
their own site.
When a publisher raises concerns about channel conflict when considering becoming part of the
AudienceScience network, what do you tell them?
The AudienceScience Gateway for Publishers provides publishers complete control to choose how they work with
us. We do not represent the publisher without their permission and the flexibility that we have built into our
audience platform ensures publishers that channel conflict is a non-issue.
Given these new partnerships do you see AudienceScience offering a supply-side platform - the publisher
answer to the demand-side platform (DSP)?
Supply side platforms have, to date, been about helping a publisher optimize third-party revenue streams. Our
supply side solution is more core to the publisher's main business model - we provide the tools to directly enable
their sales force to maximize the value of their inventory by adding audience data to the equation.
By John Ebbert
March 18, 2010 – 1:55 pm
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Brand.net CEO Blair On Company’s Video Initiatives And
VAST
February 2, 2010 – 8:23 am
Brand.net announced on Monday that it is expanding beyond graphical display advertising and including video in
its solution set. Read the release.
Brand.net CEO Elizabeth Blair discussed the company's opportunity in online video advertising with
AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: Why do you see the VAST video standard as
important for Brand.net as well as the industry as a whole?
EB: VAST is hugely important for Brand.net. We believe that media
convergence is happening in a much faster and bigger way than even the
‘experts' realize. It's being driven by consumers who increasingly don't see,
want or need separate "online" and "offline" media. The monetization players,
individually and increasingly as an industry, are making great strides in parallel
to create solutions that reflect this new reality. VAST is a terrific example of
that.
We've had no lack of desire, or customer demand, to extend into Video. But
frankly, before VAST the market was a mess. Every publisher coded things
differently, no real serving standards existed. Who has this benefitted? Format
startups investing their time and money in some basic "adaptor" technology – an endless series of cords and
plugs. Who has this hurt? Advertisers and publishers alike, near-completely beholden to a handful of fairly
unsophisticated monetization providers.
We saw standardization coming, so rather than repeat others' investments in basic plumbing we chose to (a) invest
our money and time in technology that delivers on customer requirements across formats and (b) work with the
industry to rapidly create and aggressively encourage adoption of a smart standard (VAST).
What is the "guarantee" part of Brand.net's True Video Guarantee?
At Brand.net we treat our customers the way we want to be treated. We insist that people put things in writing for
us – and then we both (a) make sure they deliver a report that they did what they said and (b) review it, and review
the information independently, to make sure we got what we paid for. We do the same for our customers. So on
Day 1 of offering our Video Advertising Solution, we issued our True Video Guarantee TM. In addition to all our
standard Display guarantees, we guarantee in writing clear treatment of the issues our customers told us were
most critical, and most problematic, in the current online Video offerings. Specifically, our customers told us:
1. They are tired of paying the steep CPMs for "pre-roll" and finding their ads running inbanner.
2. They want to be in quality streaming environments.
3. Video ad networks have been offering a surprisingly "tail focused" product.
Can brand marketers buy in real-time on the spot market? What are the challenges here?
Can they? You bet. Does doing so address their business and marketing objectives? No it does not. So the online
media world of today - where the only option the DSPs and the vast majority of ad networks offer Brand marketers
is "buy spot" - is a world where 94% of Brand spending remains offline.
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Dan Ballister put it perfectly in his comment on a very insightful article from Michael Zimbalist at the New York
Times:
"If [Brand] buyers are going after audiences in real-time auctions, will they make peace with having to forfeit control
over ad environment and delivery predictability? What good is it to reach your audience when they don't want to be
found, or to only run 15% of your back-to-school campaign on time because you kept getting outbid?"
To bring their budgets online, Brand advertisers need a more effective approach. They need a forward market,
built on top of the current spot market, with sophisticated page-level quality filtering; price and volume forecasting;
buy automation; delivery management; and offline impact measurement.
By John Ebbert
February 2, 2010 – 8:23 am
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Collective Discusses AMP Platform’s New Engagement
Metrics And Above-The-Fold Targeting
March 1, 2010 – 3:29 pm
Last week, Collective announced new engagement metrics
capabilities for AMP 3.0, its "its network administration, audience
targeting, and reach extension platform for buy-side and sell-side
ad networks." Read the release.
Collective's SVP of Tech Sales & Client Services, Andrew Kraft,
discussed the platform's new tracking capabilities with
AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: Is the new attribution offering in response to your agency partners or are you being
pro-active? Anecdotally from here, it seems that agencies are still predominantly reporting CTR as a key
success metric.
This technology has been available exclusively on The Collective Network, so we know that advertisers value it.
With regard the industry moving toward attribution measurement, the evolution has been gradual, but brand
advertisers in particular are looking past CTR as the primary indicator or an advertisement's success.
Collective's engagement metrics solution measures interactions (clicks, click-thrus, mouseovers), views, and
average view time on all add units, including non-rich media standard units such as JPEGs and GIFs, for about a
year. This new piece of software has been built so that it can integrate to both the AMP for Publishers sell-side and
AMP for Advertisers demand-side analytics, targeting, and media buying systems. Built as a way to address the
dying value of the rapidly disappearing clickthru rates – along with studies questioning the value of the clicker
overall – the system was originally rolled out only to the Collective Network, which has been offering these metrics
to advertisers for the last year.
With more and more agencies looking for other metrics, the Collective Network saw a greater and greater desire
for these metrics. After a year of battle-testing the system, Collective's Technology Solutions group has now made
these metrics available to its technology clients – both buy-side and sell-side networks – to integrate into their own
offerings.
What's your view on why brand marketers are slow to move dollars online? Attribution would appear to be
one important key, but what else is getting in the way?
Attribution of offline purchases to online marketing is certainly another such reason, but not the only one by a long
shot. There are a number of reasons, the greatest of which is probably simple inertia. Big institutions have been
built around the traditional media ecosystem and its economics. There is also a learning curve for some traditional
brand marketers. We hear from our agency partners that some of their online clients are asking for gross ratings
point equivalents for online.
And it's only recently that an advertiser could buy targeted audiences at scale. A major brand marketer like J&J
doesn't want to reach "the right audience anywhere", because environment matters. For direct response, it might
be fine to reach an intender anywhere they are, but for those seeking to influence brands, the quality and type of
content in which the ad sits matters. I, for one, am more likely to have a positive reaction to a J&J ad when I'm on a
high-end site than if I saw it on Joe's Garage Shop page. The last thing a major marketer wants is for me to
remember their ad as "that ad I saw on some Jersey Shore TV show fan site".
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As brand marketers are finding the right user in the right content, rather than exchanges that just find those users
anywhere, they are also looking to break away from the Pandora's box of metrics that the direct response
advertisers have opened. Rich Media has been measuring engagement in a number of ways – but rich media is
only a small percentage of ads shown. In order to capture the brand dollars, we needed metrics with which brand
marketers could identify.
First came the interaction. Clicks are a measure of how often someone is willing to leave the content that they
have explicitly sought and follow the lure of an ad. When on "long tail", the draw of content is not particularly
strong. When on premium content, that click rate naturally drops, because the user would rather read that which
they sought. That said, there are many studies that said that the user's eyes follow their mouse – so adding
mouseovers to clicks and clickthrus meant that a better measure of the brand interaction could be made.
Then came views. While it was important to ensure that the ad was in the viewable area of the browser, the real
value was the view time. Above the fold and below the fold don't matter in the long run, as long as the ad is in the
viewable area of the browser for an appropriate amount of time. This is especially important for pulling dollars
online from offline. A brand marketer that realizes that they can reach users at a lower cost per thousand views
online than offline – and yet still be in front of the users for an average of 30 seconds or more – are more likely to
bring dollars over.
Given the positive interaction between search and display, can Collective's attribution solution track the
viewthroughs and effect between the two digital channels? If not, any plans here to marry search with
display through AMP and attribution modeling?
Collective's AMP does measure interaction between search and display. Using the AMP Audience Analytics
system, special attribution pixels are created and distributed to the client to use in their search marketing. The
results of display ads are then analyzed to see where the users who viewed, clicked, interacted, or acted in
response to an ad also viewed the company's search campaigns. This functionality has been available since the
release of AMP3 several months ago.
In the release, you say that Collective is the only platform that can assess if an ad is "within the viewable
portion of a user's screen." But, there are others that can do above-the-fold targeting. What's the
difference with Collective's solution for above-the-fold, in particular?
Above-the-fold targeting is done in two ways today. The most popular way is to have the site owners only run the
tags on those placements that are coded to be in the upper portion of a page. This is an inexact science, as for
certain screen resolutions, that above-the-fold placement is actually outside the viewable area of the browser. That
said, it is usually general accepted that if on the average screen resolution, an ad is in the viewable area upon
page load, it is above the fold, and every publisher has placements that are within these windows spatially. The
other method is to serve a rich media unit, and let that rich media unit determine real-time if the ad is in the
viewable area or not – only displaying 'above-the-fold guaranteed creative' if the ad is in the appropriate
placement. Collective's AMP actually analyzes all placements, not just rich media placements, to determine the
location of the ad.
What we have found is often what publishers call above-the-fold is not so. AMP Platform clients can now analyze
their inventory – and when too much of a publisher's inventory is below the fold, remove that publisher from the
network or ad spend. In this way, the metrics are not just for reporting to advertisers, but also for helping to
manage affiliate and audience extension partnerships.
Another key difference between what AMP is doing verses other technologies, is that we track the difference
between the "initially" above the fold view as well as the "cumulative" above the fold view, as most ads become
viewable after user interaction; largely scrolling and and down the page.
By John Ebbert
March 1, 2010 – 3:29 pm
39
Orange-France Telecom And OpenX Launch A New Ad
Exchange In Europe
March 31, 2010 – 4:05 am
OpenX announced a major expansion of its exchange strategy and
infrastructure as it will partner with Orange-France Telecom Group
to create the Orange Ad Market. According to a release, "The initial
launch will take place in the second quarter of 2010 in the UK and
France with planned launches following elsewhere in Orange’s
European footprint." Read more.
With localized access points of the Orange Ad Market, Orange and
OpenX hope to harness the growing exchange business
throughout Europe. Orange will leverage not only its publisher
relationships, but its deep agency ties to drive business through the
exchange as the conglomerate looks to ensure that the exchange
model's future is not controlled by any single entity - such as Google. Orange's Pelillo told AdExchanger.com, "We
are a clear and open alternative in a nascent market."
For OpenX, they're targeting Europe through a partner. The Orange Ad Market is the European extension of their
worldwide exchange and the unlocking of European sites through its exchange will likely yield European ad dollars
as well as U.S. ad dollars. U.S. agencies, for example, could buy European, or even U.S. audience on European
websites available through the Orange Ad Market.
With Orange's unique inventory, the Orange Ad Market could become an important source of inventory to demandside platforms looking to scale beyond what's typically been available through Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange,
Yahoo!'s Right Media Exchange and a few others. Given legislative moves in the EU recently to prevent cookie
tracking, it will be interesting to see how the demand-side platform opportunity evolves as cookies are mapped
across inventory sources and around the globe.
Tim Cadogan, CEO of OpenX, and Vincent Pelillo, Director, Orange Advertising Network, Orange, discussed
details of the new partnership.
AdExchanger.com: How does Orange Ad Market fit within OpenX's overall exchange strategy?
Cadogan of OpenX: It fits perfectly with OpenX’s exchange strategy, which is clear and simple. It is to power a
completely open, transparent and unified global exchange that drives significant economic value for publishers and
ad buyers and provides an alternative choice for all participants. Bringing major regional partners - like Orange in
the case of the Orange Ad Market partnership - into a global alliance based on the OpenX Market fits so well with
the strategy because it brings the best of a truly global market together with a deeply multi-local approach, thereby
driving participation, scale and choice.
What will prevent Google and Yahoo!'s Right Media from taking OpenX exchange business in Europe - and
globally?
Cadogan: With Orange Ad Market, OpenX and Orange believe we are taking a totally new and competitively very
differentiated approach to building the exchange space in Europe. It’s important to note that the exchange space in
Europe is still very early and no one owns it. It needs real focus and careful attention in order to help it reach its full
potential. Orange and OpenX are convinced that by combining the benefits of deep multi-local knowledge and
experience, dedicated local Orange teams and long-established supply and demand relationships in Europe
together with a unified global market and technology platform from OpenX we will be able to grow the exchange
market very successfully. We think this approach is different, better, sustainable and provides a real choice in the
market for publishers and buyers.
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Why go with a partner such as Orange in Europe?
Cadogan: The most important dimension of a good partnership is strategic alignment on the purposes of the
partnership. Orange and OpenX agree completely on the problems the display market faces (supply fragmentation,
buyer inefficiency etc). We both see exchanges as extremely promising ways to solve these problems. We both
saw the potential for a new, breakthrough approach by combining multi-local and global approaches in a unique
way. Furthermore, we also agree that it is important for there to be a neutral choice in the space. At OpenX, we
also found it very exciting that such a major technology and media company wanted to invest its resources and
partner with us to lead the evolution of a nascent online advertising category. These fundamentals form the
foundation for our partnership and why we are so excited about it.
On the operational side there are several extremely compelling reasons for OpenX to partner with Orange.
1. On the supply side
a. Orange has extensive owned and operated supply. They are one of the top 25 publishers in the world.
They will be flowing a significant part of this supply into the Orange Ad Market, which provides obvious
scale benefits and also helps other publishers follow suit.
b. Orange has also been operating ad network/site representation businesses in Europe for several years,
representing many leading third-party publishers – in fact Orange Ad Network is the largest in Europe. This
gives them very deep experience and knowledge of publisher needs and approaches. In fact, much more
so than any other exchange operators. This knowledge and these relationships will help us quickly bring in
more supply.
2. On the demand side, Orange has exceptionally deep and long-standing relationships with agencies and
advertisers across Europe.
3. On the people side, Orange has terrific people with many years experience working in the European ad
markets building strong relationships and trust with publishers, agencies and advertisers. These are all
critical factors that will give us leverage as we evangelize and build out the still nascent exchange space in
Europe.
4. Orange has a very strong brand that helps drive awareness and participation.
Altogether we couldn't be more excited about the partnership we have created and we are looking forward to
deploying Orange Ad Market in the next few weeks.
Why is Europe ready for the exchange model today?
Pelillo of Orange: At Orange we are always driven by addressing customer/client needs and through our close
relationships with both advertisers and publishers we could see a clear need for the exchange model in Europe. In
a nutshell, display is broken and full of opportunities for growth and improvement that will benefit the whole
ecosystem. The scale and efficiency of ad exchanges offer solutions to many of the problems that European
advertisers and publishers face in the display space. The opportunities for a team who can provide the right Ad
Market approach are as rich in Europe as the US and elsewhere. We think that our new Orange Ad Market
approach is going bring these opportunities to fruition, benefitting everyone.
Why is Orange creating the Orange Ad Market in partnership with OpenX?
Pelillo: We had been studying exchanges for a while, as a way of completing the offering of Orange Advertising
Network. We believe in the benefits of a local offer – being close the customer and providing a simple, relevant
solution with the best inventory. To deliver this we needed to partner with a leader in the global marketplace and
we specifically wanted a partner who followed an open approach and shared our philosophy.
We decided to partner with OpenX to develop Orange Ad Market for a number of important reasons. First, as we
began our discussions, we quickly realized that we share a common vision of how an online advertising exchange
could and should best benefit both publishers and advertisers. Moreover, we found that we are strategically
aligned with OpenX, have complementary capabilities and have the same approach to collaboration.
41
We also wanted to partner with OpenX given both its superior technology platform and capabilities as well as its
unique approach to marketplace design. And the OpenX team that is developing the market is simply world class.
Last, the fact that OpenX has such a massive global footprint was obviously important for us as we began to
consider how to best operate a global ad exchange.
How will the revenue model work for Orange?
Pelillo: Orange and OpenX share together in the transparent transaction fee we generate from ads. This fee – of
20% - is the same for all transactions. But it’s important to understand that it only applies to transactions that beat
publishers’ minimum prices and make them more money. As a result, we make money when we help publishers
make more money.
By John Ebbert
March 31, 2010 – 4:05 am
42
TRAFFIQ CEO Kahn On Datran Media Integration And
Audience Buying Pain Points
January 20, 2010 – 6:10 pm
TRAFFIQ and Datran Media announced a partnership today
that will integrate Datran's audience measurement platform Aperture - into TRAFFIQ's media platform. Read the release.
TRAFFIQ CEO Mark Kahn spoke with AdExchanger.com about
the industry and the announcement.
AdExchanger.com: What are some of the pain points of
audience buying today?
MK: There are three fundamental areas where audience buying
can create pain: efficiency, control and transparency -- and they
go hand-in-hand-in-hand. Buying audience is obviously all
about the cookie and I think there is industry acceptance of the cost/benefit that comes with reaching the right
users at scale. However, just because we understand the risks doesn't mean clients understand them. And buying
audience across exchanges and networks still doesn't alleviate the risk of reaching the right user in a dark corner
of the web. You may hit the right user, but your brand is still at risk when you can't control the environment that the
user is in.
When I say transparency, I mean transparency in data and placement. While an advertiser might be reaching the
right audience, the precise definition of that audience and the methodology used to get there is still "secret sauce."
This is one reason that demand-side platforms are taking shape -- to give the data control back to the client. But if
you're buying audiences across third-party exchanges, they can only reveal so much without exposing their own
black box methodology. On top of that, one provider's audience definition may be very different from another
provider, even though they are describing them precisely the same way. Not all "auto intenders" are created equal.
When I say efficiency, media planners and buyers are faced with a disparate set of tools with disparate data sets to
weed through. With TRAFFIQ and now Aperture, we are further consolidating the tools and assets needed to do
effective media planning and buying and to strip out both cost and endless inefficiency that you lose off of
TRAFFIQ.
AdExchanger.com: Is the audience measurement technology directly mapped to audience targeting
technology? Are you buying cookies for a target audience that have been identified through Datran's
system on the TRAFFIQ network of sites?
MK: It will be. We'll soon be able to map the composite audience profiles of different campaign audiences back to
those audiences elsewhere on the web, giving our partners the ability to find similar high performing audiences at
scale but with total placement control. This will provide data to take true action against. Ultimately, another tool to
deliver better overall campaign performance. Remember that in our model, we're matching buyers and sellers
directly, so it's not about dynamic cookie recognition and delivery. It's about empowering agencies and advertisers
with more data, and then allowing publishers who have matching audiences to work with those buyers to create
the best media package possible. Our clients and soon our publishers will be able to build these audience profiles - meaning TRAFFIQ is truly a transparent audience matching system, not just a closed-loop exchange with limited
transparency.
AdExchanger.com: Other than audience buying, what trends are you seeing from clients today?
43
MK: Obviously, one trend we're seeing is an increase in the amount of sites per plan. We are also seeing brand
dollars starting to flow again. As the mid-tail becomes more quantified in terms of audience value, and if you make
the mid-tail transparent, suddenly advertisers feel more comfortable buying beyond just the same comScore top 50
sites they've run with for years. But you need an ability to get to scale in the mid-tail, and TRAFFIQ allows for that.
Site and audience discovery is increasingly a focus. "What's new" is less about new ad packages and more about
new audiences and content. We're also seeing a healthy return of regional advertisers who remained on the
sidelines in 2009. And, finally, we're seeing an increased need to provide clients with cross-media analytics.
Conversion attribution is always an issue but more and more clients are looking for data to allow them to
understand value of conversion sources, latent conversion effects, and thus are more inclined to understand the
value of different parts of each buy -- not just blindly optimizing against a top-line eCPA goal.
By John Ebbert
January 20, 2010 – 6:10 pm
44
TRAFFIQ CEO Kahn Looks At TAAN Partnership And
Exclusivity Among Agency Holding Companies
March 10, 2010 – 2:17 pm
TRAFFIQ announced a partnership with Transworld Advertising
Agency Network (TAAN), a network of independent advertising
agencies in 40+ markets worldwide. According to the press
release, "TRAFFIQ will be the digital media platform TAAN
recommends to its member agencies." Read it.
TRAFFIQ CEO Mark Kahn discussed the TAAN partnership,
agency holding companies and client momentum.
AdExchanger.com: How are you solving the services needs for TAAN members -- and other clients for that
matter? For example, it would seem that with TAAN's member agencies all over the world, it could be a
particular challenge for TRAFFIQ and the agencies?
MK: TAAN and its member agencies face the same challenges as our other clients: the need to maximize scale
and efficiency, but to also exercise total media control with as much transparency as possible. In the everchanging digital ecosystem, buyers face a set of challenges that require specific tools built for their needs. Legacy
marketing systems are being retrofit to adapt to today's digital climate; TRAFFIQ is custom-built for the digital world
specifically to deliver scalable, SaaS-model infrastructure to agencies looking to do more with less.
TAAN's members are mostly mid-size agencies, which is an under-served market but one that is a focus for
TRAFFIQ. Unlike the large holding company shops who seem to have limitless resources, many smaller agencies
don't yet have access to planning data, ad serving software, or advanced analytics. For these bandwidthconstrained agencies, TRAFFIQ can be a complete digital display solution, addressing RFP creation, distribution,
ad serving, analytics, and billing and reconciliation. Ultimately, what we really provide is bandwidth. As more
marketing budget moves in the digital direction, agencies must master a new discipline. Adding digital budget
means adding more tools, more personnel trained in digital media and ad operations, having to spend more time
on billing, etc.
The global nature of TAAN reflects TRAFFIQ's coming focus on expansion beyond the U.S. We built the system on
a scalable architecture with the ability to be multi-lingual, providing us flexibility as we introduce TRAFFIQ into new
markets. Agencies around the world are laser-focused on unlocking pockets of inventory and audience that
perform for them -- however, today's tools often don't allow enough cross-border communications.
Brands are global, e-commerce is global, and therefore, TRAFFIQ is uniquely positioned to help all agencies
identify target audiences wherever they may be. We expect that international TAAN members will quickly learn to
create their own marketplaces of local inventory based on their activity, as liquidity breeds growth in any market.
Is it difficult making partnerships with other advertising holding companies once you've publicly
announced a partnership with a competing holding company?
It's something that both TRAFFIQ and our partners are sensitive to, but it hasn't been an obstacle to growth.
Holding companies and agency consortia like TAAN understand that in a business like ours, exclusivity rarely
exists. But that's also a good thing. TRAFFIQ is a demand aggregator, only for guaranteed premium inventory and
audience instead of non-guaranteed in the traditional DSP/RTB model. Liquidity is everybody's friend. It helps set
appropriate values on inventory and audience, attracts more publishers and networks looking to create a new
sales channel, and delivers more product feedback -- ultimately benefiting everybody. TAAN is more of an agency
group, rather than a holding company. Each agency is independently owned, but all the shops share resources
45
and refer business to one another. Groups like Worldwide Partners, AMIN, San Jose Networks and Magnet Global
all have a slightly different approach to how they work, but share the belief that there is strength in numbers.
How does business look these days between agency and direct advertiser clients and how do you see this
playing out in the future?
The advertisers are catching up to agencies, both in focus on digital media and in sophistication. This also is a
good thing for everybody involved. Agencies are being forced to sell their value by delivering insightful and
actionable data, not just their ability to procure inventory. This pushes the entire industry forward, as their need to
extract more data and insights will drive sellers to make this information available to their clients. This is part of the
reason we partnered with Datran for their Aperture product. Direct advertisers will either be lured back to agencies
to help them synthesize data, or they'll look for tools that can help them do it themselves.
By John Ebbert
March 10, 2010 – 2:17 pm
46
ContextWeb EVP Sears Discusses RTB Roll-out And
PubMatic Partnership
March 23, 2010 – 6:08 am
ContextWeb announced a partnership last week with publisher
yield optimizer, PubMatic. Read the release.
ContextWeb EVP Jay Sears addressed the new partnership as well
the roll-out of real-time bidding on the ADSDAQ Exchange.
Why expand the inventory for ContextWeb's ADSDAQ Exchange with the PubMatic partnership?
Additional inventory - in this case via PubMatic's RTB - allows us to continue to grow user and impression counts,
overlay the additional targeting, deliver advertising campaigns at scale and gain access to the publishers that
leverage PubMatic’s yield optimization solution.
How do ADSDAQ advertisers take full advantage of the real-time bidding functionality offered through
PubMatic? For example, can ADSDAQ advertisers append data and dynamically price according to the
user who is being shown an impression?
All advertisers buying inventory on the ADSDAQ Ad Exchange have access to ad sellers from PubMatic. In
addition to our longstanding Media Sales group that services named accounts at agencies and direct advertisers,
ContextWeb now has two additional selling groups within the Exchange. The ADSDAQ Brokerage allows
publishers and aggregators (such as ad networks) to buy inventory and our ADSDAQ Exchange Inside Sales
group introduces new buyers to the Exchange via our self-service Buying Desk as well as our full suite of media
products. While we are still best known for operating a “futures exchange” with flighted campaigns and guaranteed
pricing and delivery, an increasingly large segment of advertisers uses the bidded self service product which acts
as a “spot market”. Advertisers can both target their own users as well as target in-market, intent and
demographics of users via appended data through our newest audience products that are now available.
What are the plans with ContextWeb's own real-time bidding API which was announced last April?
In addition to building a bidder to bring in RTB partners such as Pubmatic, our own real time bidding is in a beta
stage and we are expecting wider rollout in the second half of this year. We continue to be very bullish on the
prospects for RTB and it represents one of just a handful of key product initiatives for 2010.
By John Ebbert
March 23, 2010 – 6:08 am
47
FetchBack CEO Little On Recommendation Retargeting
And Recent Developments
April 14, 2010 – 9:29 am
FetchBack announced yesterday that it has launched a
recommendation engine as part of its retargeting solution for
advertisers. Read the release.
FetchBack CEO Chad Little discussed the new product and recent
developments in retargeting.
AdExchanger.com: Please provide a "use case" on how FetchBack's machine-learning technology works.
The only use case we can provide now is just to describe more about how it works since advertisers are just
getting going.
The recommendation technology (like most) looks at the data on browsing behavior, shopping cart abandonment
behavior and purchase behavior of each individual. It then looks a like-minded individuals and what their behaviors
are. We're analyzing data patterns on each individual advertiser site and as time goes by the recommendations get
better as the data gets more rich. The most important individual to be targeting here is the person who has made a
purchase as we're able to make recommendations based on what other like-minded individuals have also
purchased. So the tech works at an individual level as well as looks at overall site patterns so if we have very little
information about a user because they haven't browsed deep into the site we're still able to make a
recommendation that should be on target.
Given the technology's ability to provide branding as stated in the release, how will the pricing model
work? Any thoughts about pricing according to engagement metrics, for example?
We work on CPC, CPA and CPM pricing models. Our product can provide more conversions that any other offer
out there - but the key to your question here is detail that can be found in our analytics - we do provide information
such as engagement with the ad (and this is going to become more rich as we can now serve up to 10
recommended products in a single ad) - this engagement data along with engagement mapping and a/b testing
provide substantial data as to how the ad is driving a conversion.
Now that Google's AdWords has announced self-service retargeting, does this impact FetchBack's
opportunity? Why or why not?
Overall it's a positive - Google's strong entry validates the opportunity in the market. At the heart of it - Google can
not drive the level of conversions that FetchBack can. While we can continue to expect Google to provide
innovative product offerings (possibly even recommendation technology like what we're talking about here) - but
Google will most likely always distribute to it's network - which, while it's a large one can't compare to the reach
FetchBack can provide - FetchBack is network agnostic and works with many players who can provide high-quality
traffic - this enables us to reach 70-80% of a clients lost prospects. When you're working to integrate an offering
like retargeting and manage multiple providers like fetchback and google it can become cumbersome - there are a
lot of benefits to working with just one.
By John Ebbert
April 14, 2010 – 9:29 am
48
Rocket Fuel Addressing Brands And Attribution Says Pres
Frankel
April 27, 2010 – 10:28 am
RocketFuel announced that it is partnering with Dynamic Logic for
its new Real Time Brand Optimzation solution which "optimizes the
targeting of [brand marketer's] campaigns based on familiar
characteristics such as being in-market for a product or being
favorable towards it." Read the release.
Richard Frankel, president of Rocket Fuel Inc. discussed the Dynamic Logic integration and challenges for brand
marketers today.
AdExchanger.com: A Dynamic Logic study used in coordination with an ad network is nothing new. How
is this different than how advertisers use DL studies to inform their audience targeting tactics?
RF: The new Rocket Fuel/Dynamic Logic brand optimization program is not a research program like previous
Dynamic Logic products, and doesn't replace them. Instead, it is a targeting product that leverages in-banner DL
studies to allow us to optimize brand campaigns against the kinds of audience characteristics -- such as
awareness, favorability, or purchase intent -- that brand advertisers are used to measuring with studies. These
characteristics are fed into Rocket Fuel's optimization engine in real-time and used to optimize campaigns on the
fly to improve overall targeting performance -- based on brand-oriented characteristics -- as the campaign is
running. This is a huge new capability that is entirely new for brand advertisers. Traditional DL studies are meant to
be deep research programs that are part of a long-term effort by advertisers to understand their campaign
performance.
What are your thoughts on the nature of "real-time" as it relates to brand awareness data? Is there a short
shelf life?
The question for any campaign -- brand or otherwise -- is how quickly advertisers can use audience data to make
informed decisions about improving their campaigns. Consumer's responses to ads -- whether it's increased
awareness, favorability, or a direct response -- fluctuate all the time as their experience and interests change. So
now that it is possible for advertisers to use brand interests and related audience characteristics to improve their
targeting on the fly, advertisers can better participate in consumers' ongoing ad experience.
How is Rocket Fuel approaching attribution modeling for brand campaigns looking to raise brand
awareness? And, what are some of the attributes that RF points to in order to help the marketer
understand the ROI of its online ad campaigns through Rocket Fuel?
Savvy digital marketers are moving away from inaccurate attribution modeling and more toward direct attribution
assessment using test and control methodologies. This type of attribution evaluation can be done by Rocket Fuel,
Dynamic Logic and others who use test/control methods. Our new partnership and system helps advertisers
deliver ads that are more relevant to their target audience. And as many brand-oriented campaigns will be focused
on targeting effectiveness – meaning, making sure that we're showing ads to the right target audience -- we will be
measuring all along if we're hitting the right target and adjusting on the fly to increase the efficiency of the
campaign. Our ongoing in-banner surveys will continue to validate that we're turning in the right direction. As brand
marketers layer on direct ROI measurement, this will be managed by companies like Dynamic Logic using tests
and controls that directly estimate attribution instead of trying to guess at it.
By John Ebbert
49
April 27, 2010 – 10:28 am
50
Smartclip’s Prohaska Discusses Company’s Video Ad
Network Model
April 23, 2010 – 12:47 am
Former AOL Vice President Matt Prohaska was recently hired as
CEO of North America by Smartclip, an online video ad network.
Read the release.
AdExchanger.com: How would you characterize Smartclip's online video advertising network business
model? Is it like a site rep firm?
MP: It certainly is. Old-timers like me and many of our publisher and advertiser partners remember what
DoubleClick was like pre-DART, as the top rep firm in the display space in the late '90s. Smartclip is positioned to
be a bit more old-school like DoubleClick was by working with pubs and marketers fundamentally different than
other U.S. video ad networks in several ways. First, we are additive to an in-house sales team, not combative.
Second, we work with exclusive inventory (or semi-exclusive with their in-house sales team) from almost every
publisher we have on the roster today. Third, we provide transparency to buyers around where ads are running
and analytics to know what is working and not working in meeting their objectives. We certainly leverage more than
just our solid sales team, such as our proprietary tech and partnership with Eyewonder, to provide value to
publishers. But we are not in the business of simply arbitraging inventory in a black box and cutting checks to
publishers with few insights as to how that revenue was driven and earned.
In conversations with publishers who have available video inventory, how do you convince them that you
will not create a conflict with their direct sales channel?
We fundamentally do not start conversations with advertisers by saying, "We can get you on premium site X but
$1.00 CPM cheaper!" That doesn't help anyone long-term in providing real value. We carve out inventory
appropriately so everyone knows who has what and communicate actively with white/black client lists if needed to
protect against conflicts. Many of us have worked at top publishers before so we understand and respect their
position in this dynamic ecosystem of online advertising. We just want to make sure Smartclip is a video partner
that is helping drive revenue and creating solid experiences for their audiences and our marketers.
Smartclip is late to the game in the U.S. How can you compete with more established players in the U.S.
online video advertising market?
There are two major reasons why we can compete against the major players in this space: First, if you remember,
Google was "late" to the game on paid search post-goto.com/Overture, and has been doing pretty well, from what I
hear.
That said, second-mover advantage can exist in any business and we think in our space as well, since it's
so early in the evolution of digital video. Second, since we were founded in Germany and have offices doing very
well across Europe including France, there is the cheesy analogy I've been using internally. I feel like we're racing
in the Tour de France, starting about five stages late (since we're only five months old in the U.S.), but have been
blessed with driving a BMW instead of riding a bike. The fuel comes from the momentum we have globally thanks
to more than two years of success throughout Europe. This should help us catch up here in the U.S. if we pick the
right partners and communicate and deliver the right value propositions efficiently and effectively. This is just my
fourth week on the job and we’re looking at a major pipeline of new partnerships and customers and seeing some
great results in a very short time.
By John Ebbert
April 23, 2010 – 12:47 am
51
Wild Tangent Seeks To Entice Brand Marketers With
BrandBoost Ad Platform Says EVP Madden
February 23, 2010 – 9:26 am
WildTangent, with an online games ad network of over 100+ million
unique users according to the company, announced a "unique
advertising platform, BrandBoost™, which provides brand
marketers the opportunity to reward gamers with complimentary
game play and virtual items in return for brand engagement." Read
the release (PDF).
WildTangent's EVP of Business Development and Marketing, Dave Madden, shared a few insights into the new
platform with AdExchanger.com.
What data points do you capture with BrandBoost in order to express brand engagement to brand
marketers?
We capture standard ad metrics including click-through data. What’s important to keep in mind is that the user
chooses whether or not to engage with the advertisement. It is presented to them as an alternative to monetary
payment.
How do you charge for BrandBoost?
We charge on a cost per engagement basis usually in neighborhood of $.10-$.15 which translates into a $100$150 cpm.
In that consumers are incented to interact with advertising with virtual currency and rewards, does this
skew the opportunity at all for advertisers using the BrandBoost ad platform? How do you make the case
here for marketers?
Not at all. The consumer is making the choice to view an ad as an alternative to purchasing an item or paying for a
game session. The choice to interact is independent and is typically the result of the ad being relevant and
targeted. As an example, we are currently running an ad with the popular Percy Jackson movie which runs only in
tween-targeted games.
By John Ebbert
February 23, 2010 – 9:26 am
52
Yahoo!’s Wise And McGrory On Demand-Side Platform
Pilot Program, Real-Time Bidding
March 16, 2010 – 11:31 am
Yesterday, Yahoo! announced their demand-side platform (DSP)
pilot program yesterday in a post co-authored by Ramsey McGrory
(VP, North American Marketplaces) and Seth Dallaire (VP, Mid
Market Sales) on the Yahoo! advertising blog. In discussing its
partnership with five demand-side platforms and its DSP strategy
going forward, McGrory and Dallaire wrote:
"The pilot will demonstrate how Yahoo!, in partnership with
these industry leaders, can provide marketers with access
to the audiences they most want to reach by leveraging
insights from buyers, sellers and 3rd party data providers.
This pilot will also enable DSPs to establish a more
integrated, deeper relationship with the Yahoo! Network
and the Right Media Exchange."
McGrory and Bill Wise, VP/GM, Ad Platforms, Yahoo! discussed the announcement and its implications with
AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com It appears Yahoo! is no longer moving forward with its own DSP strategy and Yahoo
will look to enable DSP partners. Why the change?
Bill Wise: Our channel sales strategy with DSPs was always two-fold; represent audience-buying for a very select
number of large marketers directly, while enabling the broader market. This is similar to working with differentiated
ad networks who represent marketers we already work with, but whom offer a layer of technology, data or insight
that differentiate the offering.
Various capabilities of the Right Media Exchange are similar to DSP capabilities - such as decisioning,
optimization, and analytics technology. We love enabling DSPs that provide unique, innovative technology and
services to our client. Either way, we collectively leverage Yahoo!'s science, art and scale to deliver on the promise
of audience-based buying.
AdExchanger.com: Why did you choose these 5 DSPs (Invite Media, Mediamath, DataXu, Turn and X+1) to
co-develop DSP best practices?
Ramsey McGrory: Yahoo! has built relationships with leading DSPs through the Right Media Exchange and
through existing agency relationships. Our initial partner list was based on agency feedback and deep discussions
with the DSPs in the space. We will add more partners in the future.
AdExchanger.com: When will the real-time bidding (RTB) feature come to RMX and Yahoo! inventory? Will
Yield Manager be phased out or is it getting "upgraded" with RTB?
Ramsey McGrory: Yahoo! has been testing non-hosted RTB quietly for over the past year with several partners,
through the RMX platform. Through the DSP program, we are expanding the number of buying partners testing it.
Bill Wise: We are also in the process of adding publishers from the Right Media Exchange for RTB testing. Yield
manager is a critical piece of this, so no change there.
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AdExchanger.com: Using RTB, DSPs will be able to map user cookies across buys across ad exchanges
such as RMX and DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Is interoperability between exchanges still important?
Bill Wise: It is our hope and intention for RTB to become a standard between exchange's dynamic supply sources-the industry needs it. Standardizing the way RTB happens is important, and we need to come together to ensure
we don't have too many different ways of performing this kind of integration.
Ramsey McGrory: It's not trivial and we're currently not consistent in how as an industry we do it. Regarding
interoperability between exchanges, RTB sprung up in part as a response to there not being interoperability
between exchanges, so RTB in essence allows for interoperability.
By John Ebbert
March 16, 2010 – 11:31 am
54
Analysts
Data Nugget: Banner Ad Spending Will Be 20.9% Of
Internet Ad Spending This Year Says eMarketer’s
Hallerman
January 14, 2010 – 3:49 pm
In a discussion with AdExchanger.com, Emarketer's senior online advertising analyst, David Hallerman, looks at
display advertising and current challenges in display ad research today.
AdExchanger.com: Briefly, what does eMarketer's
most recent research say about expected ad spending
trends in online display? And what are the drivers?
Trends in online display ad spending point to its diverse
uses. While US banner and rich media ad spending in
2010 will grow slightly at 3.3% and 5.5%, respectively,
online video ad dollars will jump by 39.9%.
Those mild but positive spending gains for banners and
rich media describe a commoditized ad format that many
marketers will use mainly to fill gaps in online campaigns.
Video, on the other hand, is still the holy grail for brand
marketers online. The high growth rate will be due to the untapped dollars flowing into video ads, supported by the
increased viewing of professional video content -- which gains more trust from brands than user-generated
content.
Perspective, though: While video spending will increase tremendously, it will represent only 6.1% of total Internet
ad spending this year. In contrast, banner ad spending will be a 20.9% slice of the total pie.
AdExchanger.com: What are some of the key challenges when researching a piece for display
advertising?
The main challenge is figuring what portions of the banner ad market is sold on a CPM basis, as compared with
the growing share sold on a performance basis.
Furthermore, even as spending growth is relatively flat at 3.3%, the increase in impressions will be greater as the
per-unit cost drops. That shift points to the ways that banner ads can be seen as a foundation supporting other
online advertising, such as paid search, and offline ad campaigns on TV, radio, and print.
By John Ebbert
January 14, 2010 – 3:49 pm
55
Buying Platforms
AdBuyer.com Releases New, Free Audience Profiles
Product; CEO Ogilvie Says Company Looking To Improve
Efficiency For Search Marketers
April 21, 2010 – 5:43 am
AdBuyer.com announced a new, free audience profiling tool aimed
at search marketers. Read the release.
AdBuyer.com CEO Tim Ogilvie discussed the new product and the
company.
AdExchanger.com: Why is your new "Audience Profiles" product free?
TO: We're making it free because it has such an impact on performance that we're trying to get it as broadly
distributed as possible. We're trying to make it faster, cheaper, and easier for search marketers to be successful
with display. The marketers we talk to are excited about the opportunity in the ad exchanges, but are often
confused about where to get started or have been burned in the past by under-performing display. Audience
Profiles helps them uncover the data segments that are going to deliver performance before they spend their
money. This also helps marketers leverage the data from their existing search campaigns by understanding the
users that are converting.
In my first Displaying Search column, I outlined a three-step roadmap for search marketers getting started in
display. Audience Profiles makes it much easier for marketers to execute on this play. We lead them along the way
and do the work for them.
In addition to audience targeting, is placement important to your customers and how much transparency
do you offer them on placement?
We focused first on uncovering the audience segments that convert because it tends to be more "portable" data.
Marketers can do lots of things when they know that their customers tend to live in urban areas, make more than
$100K annually, and have kids. We help them launch highly targeted ads, but they can also design more effective
creative and landing pages, or better segment their product offerings. Contrasted with knowing that a user visited
facebook.com or yahoo.com in the past month, it's much more useful. But we plan to launch tools that make
finding placements that will work later this year.
On transparency, we're struggling with the rest of the industry to find the right balance between complete
transparency and respect for the publisher's direct sales efforts. We currently provide site-level detail to select
clients but don't provide the same transparency through our self-serve interface. Others in the category have been
more aggressive here, so I expect we'll follow their lead and provide full transparency.
What else are you seeing from AdBuyer customers today? Any trends you can share? Are your customers
100% search marketers, for example?
Our core customer is typically a top 5000 search marketer, but that's not 100% of our customer base. In many
cases, our customers are finding that their marginal ROI from search isn't as high as it was in the past and they're
looking for new opportunities that can help them keep growing. There's a lot of interest and excitement around ad
exchange buying, but a lot fo confusion about the right way to approach it.
56
Can AdBuyer.com map a single user cookie across multiple exchanges and publishers today? Do search
marketers understand why this is important? Or is it still an education project on your end?
While we can do this, I'm not convinced the details matter much to our customers. Our core customers are
principally concerned with whether their advertising is making the cash register ring. As such, our education efforts
are focused on helping advertisers understand which audiences and sites they should be targeting, and how to
incorporate that spend into a marketing portfolio that includes their existing search spend. That's why Audience
Profiles are a big deal - we make it incredibly easy to understand what's likely to work without effort or spend.
Finally, on creative, what is Adbuyer.com doing to help with the display ad unit - not a strong suit for
search marketers I would think?
This is a real problem for search marketers. We offer an ad customization tool that allows users to easily create
variants of headlines, ad text, call-to-actions, and animation. Advertisers can use our 100+ ad templates or develop
their own for customization with our tool. But I do think there's more to be done here and will be an important part
of any long-term winners.
By John Ebbert
April 21, 2010 – 5:43 am
57
AdGear Building A New Ad Serving Platform For
Advertisers And Publishers Says VP Stesin
January 27, 2010 – 9:51 am
Vlad Stesin is VP, Strategy at BLOOM Digital Platforms, makers of AdGear, an ad serving platform.
AdExchanger.com: Please discuss AdGear. How
did it start? And what challenge is AdGear trying
to solve?
The team working on the platform has built and
operated the proprietary ad serving infrastructure at
Cossette, Canada’s largest independent advertising
agency. We’ve been running that platform since
2001, serving billions of monthly impressions for
clients such as Coke, General Motors Canada,
McDonald’s, Nike, H&M, Brother, GlaxoSmithKline,
Molson and others. Our emphasis has always been
on two things: richness of data and flexibility of ad
formats, no matter the shape they take.
In 2008 we spun out the digital marketing
technologies team into BLOOM Digital Platforms,
where we set out to build AdGear, our new
generation of ad management tools for publishers
and advertisers. Our goal is to build a true nextgeneration ad platform with an emphasis on
managing data and properly accommodating for third
party services, be it optimizers, ad networks, third
party data providers or ad exchanges. Unlike legacy
systems built before things like yield optimization and
third party data exchange were commonplace,
AdGear was built from the ground-up specifically with the intention of making dealing with such services simple
and comprehensible for publishers.
We have released a first version of the publisher product last year, while the advertiser version is currently in
closed beta.
Who do you see in your competitive set? What will be the key differentiators for AdGear?
Our focus is on data and connectivity with other systems. Digital advertising should evolve the same way Internet
itself evolved -- as a network of networks, loosely coupled together.
We feel that the stars are finally aligned for a new generation of ad serving platforms that are not constrained by
legacy technology and old paradigms for inventory management. The opportunity for us is to allow publishers to
come up with unique advertising opportunities driven by data and new creative integration possibilities, and for
advertisers to effectively leverage them.
Tell us about the video of the data visualization of AdGear RTB in action. (See a larger version of the video
here.)
58
This is a visualization of actual live traffic flowing for a simple retargeting campaign that is running for an online
stock brokerage.
From the left, the small bubbles represent the amount of queries for bids we get from the Doubleclick Exchange
2.0. On the right are the actual bids generated by the RTB engine. Pricing is fairly static in that period, but the size
of the bubbles on the right represents the CPM bid. The visualization itself is done with the help of an open-source
tool called gltail. We’ve simply configured it to take our live data, parse bids and bid requests, and visually show
what’s going on -- in real time. It's just a fun way to see what's happening.
Who will be your clients generally speaking? How might this client list expand?
On the publisher end, our ideal scenario is to work with web applications and platforms with applicative
functionality. In these cases, we inevitably create value by making available a wide range of targeting criteria,
ranging from site content to intent data, user profile data and behavior. We even have functionality that allows
publishers to share or sell their data profiles.
We believe that ultimately it’s this data that allows to create a competitive advantage for direct sales, or for clever
use of ad networks and other third party services. We are seeing a lot of traction exactly from these kinds of
partnerships, and publishers appreciate the control and choices this offers. For example, AdGear powers in-stream
ad delivery in the StreamTheWorld platform which offers live audio and video streaming solutions. Another
example is us powering ad delivery on a few niche social networks, leveraging proprietary profile and behavior
data.
On the advertiser side we have two Canadian agencies that are participating in the closed beta. Our goal there is
to help agencies transition from ad serving platforms to trading platforms, building data networks around brands
and plugging into the right pools of inventory. An emphasis there is put on benchmarking, which we feel helps
media agencies gain strategic control over customers.
As far as expanding the client list, soon we are planning to announce a distribution agreement with a major
software company who counts many of the world's biggest newspapers as their clients. That partnership and a few
others like it are part of our larger integration strategy.
How does AdGear address publisher needs that haven't been met previously by ad networks?
What we have to offer is technology. We don’t sell or resell media, and do not do arbitrage of any sort. We feel that
there is a class of publishers that is currently struggling with juggling their premium direct sales, their own secondand third-tier ad products, as well as ad networks. AdGear can help them go from juggling to controlling and
measuring.
Ultimately, the goal for publishers is to create a competitive advantage for themselves. I don’t think that an ad
network can do that for a publisher. The natural tendency there is to tone down the context and put an emphasis
on the user. But the sustainable edge comes from deep integration of ad platforms to take advantage of behavior
data, content, user profiles, previous ad performance and a slew of other patterns. Once that is done, plugging
third parties is easier and often allows to create more value for advertisers.
What do you see as the differences in the agency model between Canada and the rest of the world?
Generally speaking, agencies in Canada are facing the same challenges as in other parts of the world. There is an
added complexity that comes from the the bilingual nature of the country, where Quebec is a self-contained media
environment with its own media brands and habits.
From the perspective of ad exchanges, data exchanges and real-time bidding, I don’t see much activity in Canada
just yet, but the market will certainly catch up once it becomes more mainstream in the U.S.
How do you see the exchange space playing out in the next few years?
59
I am hoping that ad exchanges will not become asylums for the “evil aliens of the direct response planet”, as
Randall Rothenberg succinctly coined the term. The principles behind ad exchanges, allowing advertisers to
exercise more control over the process of reaching the right audience, should serve both to direct response and
brand advertisers. Although DR campaigns are a no-brainer, brand campaign are currently at a disadvantage.
We believe that real-time bidding itself should and will become part of first-party ad serving systems, especially at
larger publishers reluctant to commoditize their inventory by dealing with intermediaries. The challenge for
advertisers will be in benchmarking and keeping track of the diverse targeting criteria available across the various
pools of inventory. But it’s also a source of strategic control, and we will be seeing more of agencies using data as
a main driver of their competitive advantage.
What are your thoughts on data exchanges?
It is a fantastic trend because it puts an emphasis on the audience. In a more global sense, value systems based
on the exchange of data are a good thing for the industry and for the consumer. And ultimately it all comes back to
the idea of publishers and advertisers having the right tools to exercise complete control over their data -- whether
it is to use it themselves or to collaborate with third parties.
What doesn't get commoditized in the end? Data? Algos? Other?
As someone who spent years in the agency environment working with big brands, I am cautious of jumping to the
conclusion that data alone will solve the commoditization problem. The new ad ecosystem needs to work in unison
to actually create value for advertisers, and this goes beyond the idea of simply reaching the right people.
What doesn’t get commoditized is media creativity: publishers and agencies having the right tools in their hands to
gather insights from data, plug into third party services and come up with clever ad executions. Sometimes this
requires new formats and custom integrations, which need to be accommodated for but are typically too difficult to
manage with legacy ad platforms. This is a huge challenge but we're very excited to be creating these
opportunities.
Follow Vlad Stesin (@vstesin), BLOOM Digital (@bloomdigital) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on
Twitter.
January 27, 2010 – 9:51 am
60
Brandscreen Offering Demand-Side And Sell-Side Platform
Trading Solutions Says CEO Tol
April 12, 2010 – 12:42 pm
Julian Tol is the Founder & CEO of Brandscreen Inc., a digital
media trading platform.
AdExchanger.com: What problem is Brandscreen solving?
JT: The problem we solve is the reduction of transactional friction.
Generally speaking, the industry suffers from over-complexity, with
online display sales systems built on top of offline technologies.
There's poor visibility for buyers, and declining yields for sellers.
Brandscreen's starting point is that everything we do is about
'Automating the Transaction'. We use the line 'a Reuters screen for
media industry' to make it clear that we are an end-to-end solution.
We transmit the insertion orders and clear funds for both sides of
the transaction.
Do you consider yourselves a demand-side platform? What
does your competitive set look like?
Yes, we operate a DSP, but Brandscreen technology is broader
than that. We operate an end-to-end system for electronic trading.
We transmit the orders, we exchange the data packages and we
clear the funds for both sides of the transaction. The agency
platform is branded BRANDSCREEN DSP. The publisher platform
is BRANDSCREEN SSP. I think the term 'DSP' is still evolving. If you ask an agency, then almost everything they
use to buy media is a "demand side platform', whether it's Brandscreen, AdMob or Adwords. I suspect that the
term 'DSP' will keep evolving to mean something broader than it does now, where we start to refine the label
based on buy types, media channels and trading tools. With regard to our DSP platform, our competitive set
include x+1, DataXu, MediaMath, InviteMedia and Turn.
Given your name, what's the Brandscreen pitch for brand marketers?
One of Brandscreen's key differentiators is the integration of Reach/Frequency 'brand buys', with RTB
'performance buys', into a single buy-side platform. When Reach & Frequency optimization drives the buy, it works
like this: A buyer enters geo, gender and age data alongside reach and frequency goals and other campaign
parameters. Using live connections with ratings data providers, with ad servers for avails, and agency's custom
rate cards for prices, Brandscreen presents a media schedule optimized for most efficient delivery of R&F goals.
The schedule can be customized with the buyer's preferences, and eventually bought and trafficked on screen,
end-to-end. When response optimization drives the buy, we rely solely on RTB. Our real-time bidders operate in
the major exchanges, and we optimize for CPC or CPA using multiple data sources and our own proprietary
machine-learning optimization processes.
How does Brandscreen's revenue model work?
We charge a straight transaction fee - to either the sell or the buy side, but never both. When inventory is loaded
through BRANDSCREEN SSP, the seller pays a sell-side trading commission. The seller accounts for the fee as
part of the cost-of-sale, and the agency pays nothing. When the buy is made in one of the real-time exchanges, the
agency pays a buy-side trading commission. We always show counter-parties all components of the transaction,
including agency discounts and commissions. We work on the basis of complete transactional transparency.
61
How has your own background led to the development of Brandscreen?
My agency background has led me to (try to) keep it simple. Agencies have so much going on, and we are a small
but important part of their overall world. People find our logic and UI straightforward. We don't over-complicate the
process.
What's your target market? In that you're based Australia and the U.S., what are your geographic plans, if
you will?
Our aim is to work for a handful of leading agencies in the US, UK and Australia to start with. We've actually built
the platform in both the US and Australia, so the DNA of both those markets is built into the system. Our intention
is to focus on getting the business to scale across all English-language markets globally within a relatively tight
time-frame. Geographically, we follow our agency customers.
In display, what are the key differences between the Australian market and the U.S.? Is it different for
mobile and video?
There is probably a higher general awareness about data-driven media buying and transaction automation within
the US market than anywhere else in the world. I am in awe of the innovation and entrepreneurial energy that our
industry is showing right now. I feel privileged to be a small player in this space at such an exciting moment in its
history. The closest comparison is probably the era when real-time trading platforms were introduced to the
financial markets. As for the difference... Australia is dominated by five big publishers sharing well over 50% of ad
impressions. Average CPMs are higher. Very little inventory flows through exchanges. Overall though, the markets
are pretty similar, and this also applies to mobile and video.
Please discuss Brandscreen's data strategy or offering.
We have deals with comScore and Nielsen on the Reach/Frequency buy-types, where we mash ratings data with
ad server data with our own search data... and optimize accordingly. We are fully integrated with the major
enterprise ad servers, and we are progressively building links with sell-side partners such as Rubicon. In the area
of RTB, we have integrations with Omniture and an increasingly long list of third party data providers and
exchanges.
What milestones would you like to have Brandscreen achieved a year from now?
In a year from now... we want to have a small number of large agency clients running 20-40% of their display ad
spend through the platform. In terms of milestones, that would mean having employed the Series A funding with
enough speed and agility to have successfully scaled up operations in three of our target markets.
How are you funded? Any plans to seek financing in the future?
Three years of R&D has been funded by the founders (via a previous trade sale in 2005), plus a small group of
tech angels. In 2 weeks from now we kick-off a Series A round, where we aim to raise $6M to scale up operations.
Interest has already been strong. No one else has automated both the Reach/Frequency (brand) optimization,
alongside RTB (performance) optimization. Automating both brand and RTB performance gives Brandscreen a
unique and defensible competitive advantage.
Follow Julian Tol (@juliantol) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 12, 2010 – 12:42 pm
62
Chango To Extend Search’s Reach Into Display With
Demand-Side Platform
April 29, 2010 – 1:11 am
Chris Sukornyk is CEO of Chango, an search and display demand-side
platform.
AdExchanger.com: What problem is Chango solving?
CS: Search Marketers know how to make money from the Internet
searchers they reach. They’ve got financial models, optimized keyword
lists, optimized bid prices, and text ads tuned to get attention. If they
can reach more searchers at the right price, they can make more
money. Unfortunately, SEM platforms like AdWords have lots of other
search marketers competing for the same impressions, and they only
get one chance to get the searcher’s attention, on the search results
page. What they need is more reach at the right price, and a way to
get more chances to engage each searcher. Chango enables search
marketers to effortlessly extend their campaigns to the vast reach of
display by enabling them to import their existing SEM campaigns (eg.
AdWords) including keyword lists, CPC bid prices, text ads, budgets,
and CPA targets to start reaching new searchers in minutes.
If you're a DSP, how would you define the term?
To me, a DSP is simply a media-buying platform that enables advertisers to reach their target audience, across
multiple exchanges, one impression at a time. The advertiser should be able to define their pricing and targeting
criteria for every impression they buy. And of course it has to all be automated, scale like crazy, and ideally, be
self-service. At Chango, our “Demand Side” is Search Marketers, so our platform is optimized to the operating
conventions and campaign goals of Search Marketers.
How do you differentiate Chango's offering among the competitive set? What's the target market in terms
of verticals?
At Chango, we’re unique in that our “Demand Side” is exclusively Search Marketers. Our goal is to make the
extension of existing SEM campaigns to real-time display exchanges and effortless experience. Our platform is
optimized to the operating conventions and campaign goals of Search Marketers. Like existing search-marketing
platforms, we enable CPC bidding, we target with raw search keywords, we dynamically generate display creative
from text ads, we optimize to CPA goals, and its all self-service. We partner with publishers and other 3rd party
data exchanges that are capable of providing search history data on users. We’re currently focused on
ecommerce search marketers but are starting to expand to other verticals.
What are some of the key challenges for search marketers moving into display today?
Real-time display exchanges present Search Marketers with an opportunity to effectively reach vast new
audiences. Unfortunately, working with them is hard for a Search Marketer. They have to:



Develop a new targeting methodology and establish 3rd party behavioral or intent based data relationships
to simulate the targeting they have already optimized in their SEM keyword lists
Remodel CPA goal-based budgets on unfamiliar CPM bid prices and data costs
Have new ad creative developed by an outside agency or designer
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In short, they have to abandon their optimized financial models, keyword lists, bid prices, and text ads. For most
search marketers, this presents too much complexity and risk.
Can you provide a use case of a typical campaign using Chango?
An SEM looking to extend their reach beyond search result pages simply imports their existing keywords, bid
prices, text ads, daily budgets and CPA targets from AdWords and presses go. It’s really that easy.
How will search marketers cope with creative challenges in display? How does Chango help?
This is a common problem, as most search marketers don’t have display creative. But they do have highly
optimized text ads that are proven performers. And often, these text ads work because they dynamically adapt to
the search query entered. Chango provides dynamic creative services that automatically convert text ads into
engaging display creative, even when the text has to adapt to the search query.
Is your product "live" today? Can you share your product roll-out plans?
Our Search Marketing Demand Side Platform is currently in limited production, running campaigns for a number of
close customers. We anticipate opening the platform more broadly in Q3. We also have a search targeted
Publisher Network that has been live for 5 months and is open to all publishers that want to specially target search
traffic to increase revenue. We also have a Data Network through which publishers and tool providers can
monetize their audience after they leave their site. As you would likely guess, we collect raw search data to be
targeted on the exchanges.
Do you see real-time bidding feature of exchanges having an impact on your business and search
marketing as a whole? If so, how?
It is absolutely crucial to our business. It allows us to target a specific user based on their past search history
without being forced to buy bulk impressions that would leave us with significant remnant inventory. Search
Marketers have been dabbling in display for years with little success. Real-time bidding is finally making it possible
to extend search campaigns to display. Its complex, but that’s where Chango comes in.
How does your revenue model work?
Advertisers that leverage our self-serve system pay a CPC. In managed campaigns, on a case-by-case basis, we
will also optimize on CPA and take a revenue share on lift.
Do you think retargeting is a commodity offering now? Especially now that Google has made it so easy
and self-service?
Site-retargeting is becoming common. Site-retargeting uses a client’s own data collected from their site to
remarket to users they already know. While we can leverage this data, we predominantly focus on 3rd party
search data for retargeting. Think of it as targeting a user based on an action they took on a 3rd party website.
Both forms of retargeting require visibility across vast inventory to effectively 'find' target users again. Therefore,
you need a retargeting platform that sits across multiple sources of inventory - a DSP is ideal for this. This form of
Search-Retargeting across multiple exchanges is not commoditized at all.
Please discuss your current funding and size of the company (employees). Any plans to seek another
round?
We’re a growing team of 10 financed by iNovia, Metamorphic, ExtremeVP and angels.
Follow Chango (@changoinc) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 29, 2010 – 1:11 am
64
CPM Advisors CEO Leathern Discusses BlueKai
Integration Into CPMatic And Data Trends
January 14, 2010 – 8:09 am
Demand-side platform provider, CPM Advisors, announced
a partnership today with BlueKai today which it says
uniquely offers clients access to BlueKai’s in-market data
directly within CPM Advisor’s CPMatic media buying
platform. To date, CPM Advisors has been a part of
BlueKai's Certification program. Read the release.
AdExchanger.com spoke to CPM Advisors CEO Rob
Leathern more about what this release means.
AdExchanger.com: How is this announced partnership
different than the way a DSP works with BlueKai today
such as the BlueKai Certification program?
RL: Our platform is an open self-service way to buy media and data, which means that we can bring a much wider
range of advertisers to try BlueKai data via CPMatic.com, applying our media buying optimization system to make
it work for buyers. Anyone can sign up and create an account right now and quickly be running retargeting or
behavioral campaigns across a number of providers. You still have to ask us to enable your account for behavioral
buying (retargeting is set), but that will be a standard option within the next two weeks.
AdExchanger.com: Are there specific vertical datasets which are popular with CPMa clients these days?
Any that we might not expect?
RL: We see good demand for a variety of other data in the B2B space, tech, shopping and adult education. We are
always communicating with our data partners like BlueKai and eXelate on what we're hearing in the market and
they're usually very responsive and we believe that competition to create new data segments is good for
advertisers. A few different education data segments are available via our platform today, for example.
AdExchanger.com: When buying media with data appended, could you make some general estimates
regarding how you buy? - is it through ad networks, ad exchanges, direct-to-publisher buys?
RL: Most of our data buys are via ad exchanges and large aggregated sources, though we also do run behavioral
campaigns across other media buys that we are doing when it makes sense and is okay with the publisher. Some
sources will integrate data into their own supply platforms, others not - we think it's about finding the best
combination of media and data via the most efficient avenue, for the client to get the results they want.
By John Ebbert
January 14, 2010 – 8:09 am
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CPM Advisors Leveraging Mediageeks’ Technology For
Demand-Side Platform
February 23, 2010 – 9:34 am
Demand-side platform CPM Advisors announced that it would be
leveraging the technology infrastructure of publisher optimizer,
Mediageeks. Read the release.
AdExchanger.com discussed the announcement with CPM
Advisors CEO Rob Leathern and MediaGeeks GM Jacob LeWinter.
AdExchanger.com: It's interesting that a demand-side tech
company is partnering with a publisher-side technology
company - and beyond just buying media through aggregators
(yield optimizers). What's the takeaway here?
Rob Leathern: The smart players in this space are the ones that
can build valuable core technologies but also work with other
providers who can help support those efforts with relevant technologies. It's all about driving ROI for the advertiser,
using cost-effective best-of-breed technologies that can help support that and not reinventing the wheel. Ad- and
data-serving for us is about having the quickest, cost-effective, most efficient delivery infrastructure that can
support our key assets in advertiser interface, decisioning, campaign data and budget management, and
optimization.
Jacob LeWinter: As Mediageeks built out our global infrastructure we realized our services and technology were
beneficial to more than just enterprise websites, and mediageeks evolved to be a leading ad infrastructure
company. We now work with publishers, media companies, data platforms, DSPs, and even other supply side
platforms who want robust scalable ad technology and solutions. We plan to work with the major players in each of
these areas.
Mediageeks has been working with publishers but has not been as well-known as some of the other
aggregators - why not?
Jacob LeWinter: Most clients white-label mediageeks' technology and traditionally we have only worked with very
large media companies. Mediageeks now serves billions of impressions and pixels, and this continues to grow
each day. We’re like a utility company of the ad industry. We provide the framework, but its up to media companies
to think of innovative ways to utilize us beyond just ad serving. CPM Advisors has pushed the boundaries of what
can be done with smart ad serving.
"Blazing fast ad tags" - what's that? Can you quantify and why is this important?
Rob Leathern: This is important for us since real-time bidding creates new cost parameters for serving and for
bidding on inventory and our agencies and advertiser clients deserve non-legacy purpose-built systems to realize
the efficiencies possible here. We have been building a brand new kind of data/creative serving system on top of
the Mediageeks' infrastructure that will make impression-level advertising an ROI-positive reality.
Jacob LeWinter: Mediageeks infrastructure allows for ad tags faster than most major ad servers including Dart or
Atlas. Latency is a growing issue in the industry with websites placing far too many untested pixels and tags across
their sites, which leads to frustrated end-users, not to mention lost revenue. 100% uptime and speedy tags are
critical to an enterprise business. Because we built our infrastructure from the ground up, our system is blazing
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fast. And a fast, efficient infrastructure allows a company like CPM Advisors to do real-time targeting across
multiple data criteria in an economical way for end clients.
Are there any special technical complexities to growing a self-service platform, such as CPM Advisors, as
opposed to a platform with a full-service front end?
Rob Leathern: Our technology makes large-scale display advertising accessible and efficient for advertisers of all
sizes by simplifying the process and improving the results. We're not looking to give advertisers a Star Trek-type of
media buying console: besides, it then entails teaching people yet another system. We spend a lot of time thinking
of how we can compress the time it takes to handle mundane tasks like create and receive conversion tags,
upload hundreds of flash or HTML ads, and build campaigns. We have had advertisers using our system and
telling us what they like and don't like and we continually change to react to their feedback. Understanding what
information is necessary and what is not. And being able to do that at scale means having a smart inbetween layer
that configures campaigns optimally based on target parameters, category, audience and so on. We think that
automating the advertising process is achievable for both small and large advertisers alike.
By John Ebbert
February 23, 2010 – 9:34 am
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XA.net And eXelate Look At Strong Results Of Brand Study
March 29, 2010 – 9:11 am
XA.net (formerly CPM Advisors) announced the results of a recent campaign
results using eXelate data and XA.net's platform, CPMatic.com. According to to
the release, "A computer retailer accessing eXelate data on CPMatic.com using
multi-day variable frequency caps saw a 92% ROI lift on the targeted campaign
vs. a single-frequency-cap no-data control on the same site inventory." Read the
release.
XA.net's CEO Rob Leathern discussed the results of the campaign and the
XA.net platform.
AdExchanger.com: What is meant by variable frequency caps? And why is
this an important factor in achieving favorable campaign results?
RL: It's a combination of varying the number of times we show the ads to a given user in the intender audience and
also taking into account how many times the user is actually seeing the ad (versus it showing up on the page
where they cannot see it). This is not something you can manage very easily manually, at scale. After a certain
point too, we can be pretty sure that intenders are actually "already boughts" or "never wanteds" if you know what I
mean.
Are there a limited number of sweet spots for using intender data? If so, why? Can in-market data work in
areas other than consumer electronics, autos and travel, for example?
There are a variety of variables at play that determine whether in-market targeting makes sense and have led to
these categories predominating so far online, including the length of the buying cycle, the average
margin/transaction size, the ease of aggregating enough data in a segment, and the likelihood of getting the user
to react to an ad message in that segment. One of the reasons the eXelate-CPMatic partnership is so interesting is
because the self-service component of our system (and the per-use charging model on the data) makes it quick
and easy to set up lots of small tests to assess the value of other types of data.
What differentiates the CPMatic platform from other demand-side platforms in the space?
Our platform has always been open for anyone to sign-up (and immediately use) which allows us to gather a lot of
feedback to continually evolve it. We want the overtaxed marketing manager at a company or agency to see us as
a single place they can get media, data, and consolidated reporting with a single IO / payment relationship. We
make it easy to buy ANY online media with access to every data source. And our account team is here to support
them every step of the way. We’re working to make advertising more powerful for advertisers and simpler to
understand and manage for marketers. Our technology allows both small and large-scale media buyers the ability
to create hundreds of campaigns and tags across every available supply channel in an easy and efficient manner.
Beyond showing potential customers how easy it is to buy eXelate data through CPMatic, why did you feel
the need to create http://buy-exelate-data.com ?
Our team has built ad servers and complicated back-end systems, but designing and creating front-ends to
demystify things while still allow for enough control is always especially challenging. I get to speak at industry
events fairly often, and even within the industry it has been difficult to get a quorum of advertisers understanding
retargeting and behavioral advertising, so we have been thinking about how we can explain things better and
educate people about these opportunities. It's going to continue to take time and effort to explain the nuts and bolts
stuff, especially as the noise level is high around more flighty concepts.
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In the release, you note, "The eXelate-CPMatic integration enables use-based pricing which guarantees
that the advertiser only pays for data when the desired user is reached." What has been the previous
billing/pricing method? Why move to this model?
The two main models out there are pay for data as you use it (by targeting users), or pay for data that is put into a
cookie pool that you control or have access to but have to build yourself... regardless of whether you are then able
to reach that person later. There are pluses and minuses to both approaches for various parties in the industry, but
it is clear that payment upon use is a much better model for the advertiser. I suspect that in the next 12-24 months
we will see some more variability in the types of data business models that people try, but there will always be
some tension between publisher/data creator, intermediary and advertiser on the flex between creation/usage and
the tracking thereof.
By John Ebbert
March 29, 2010 – 9:11 am
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DataXu CEO Baker On New Funds And Demand-Side
Platform Services Layer
March 8, 2010 – 2:52 pm
Demand-side platform, DataXu, announced today that it raised $11
million in a Series B financing led by VC firm, Menlo Ventures.
Read the release.
DataXu CEO Mike Baker discussed the raise and the services
layer with DataXu's offering.
AdExchanger.com: How long did it to take to raise this round? Is the DSP world resonating with venture
capital firms?
MB: While DSPs are garnering a fair amount of buzz in the investment community, at the end of the day, seasoned
investors know how to peel back the layers and focus on the fundamentals. During our conversations, the common
theme we heard was that a proven leadership team -- one that has delivered value to shareholders in the past -- is
the #1 attribute that they look for. Differentiated technology and real customer successes are critical, too. No
amount of buzz can compensate for weakness in any of these areas.
In the release, it's stated that new funds will be used "to fund new product development, sales and
marketing, and international expansion." Can you shed any more light here?
We are actively working on new feature and service extensions for our current DSP platform, as well as distinct,
new offerings. I'd rather not divulge too much yet, but in our company's vision, DSP solutions are one component
in a broader long-term strategy.
We currently work with 4 of the top 6 agency holding companies, as well as top global brands who have an
international footprint. In order to serve these clients (and new ones) in the best way possible, having a global
presence is a must.
Please discuss the DataXu services layer. How much of the campaign management is done by DataXu and
how much is on the client? How do you see this evolving?
We offer our clients two solutions, in order to meet a range of needs. For those who put a premium on media
transparency and want to manage certain aspects of their campaigns themselves, we offer a platform solution. For
those who prefer to have us optimize their entire media buy and campaign, we offer a turnkey solution, which I feel
is a requirement in a nascent market such as ours. Clients appreciate our flexibility, and if their needs evolve down
the road, we would consider other service models, too.
By John Ebbert
March 8, 2010 – 2:52 pm
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Invite Media Opens In UK; Discusses European
Opportunity
January 4, 2010 – 12:15 pm
Invite Media announced today that it has formally opened a London
office led by former Right Media employee (they're everywhere!),
Paul Turner, as it looks to expand in the UK and Europe. Read the
release.
AdExchanger.com caught up with Invite Media COO Nat Turner
about the announcement and its implications.
AdExchanger.com: What factors went into choosing to expand
in the UK as opposed to other countries?
NT: The UK is a natural first move for us beyond North America. To start, we've actually had existing customers in
the UK and Europe for some time now, so it was it made sense us to look to have a physical presence in the
region.
Second, agencies and media buyers in the UK and Europe have really started to think strongly about how they
should take advantage of the transformation that's occurring in the industry by way of ad exchanges and demandside platforms. We really enjoy working with companies who understand what's happening in the industry and can
adapt/change quickly, and we've started to see that in the UK and Europe more so than other regions. Lastly, and
more fundamentally, the exchanges themselves are much more developed in the UK and Europe than they are in
other regions. That is a clear underlying requirement for this to be feasible, so it's encouraging to see the
exchanges and UK/European publishers evolving quickly to serve the real demand that starting to flow.
AdExchanger.com: In terms of targeting UK audience on behalf of advertisers through the Invite Media
platform, are you considering direct-to-UK-publisher deals or will you buy UK audience through
aggregators (yield optimizers), exchanges, networks, etc.?
NT: That is a great question. While the exchanges are evolving faster in the UK and Europe than they are in other
regions, their reach and scale in the UK and Europe no doubt pales in comparison to North America. I think it is
inevitable that we look to work with every potential source of inventory over time if the exchanges and aggregators
aren't able to capture the entire supply pie, but our initial launch partners are the ad exchanges and publisher
aggregators (and we'd like to see it continue down that path).
One thing I will say is that Invite Media is squarely not in the business of taking media risk. Every impression that
flows through the system was purchased on behalf of an advertiser at that time with an active campaign targeting
that impression. Clients using the platform also have the ability to create their own relationships with publishers
and pipe in inventory directly, which I think we'll probably see more of internationally.
AdExchanger.com: What key difference(s) are you seeing at this early stage between UK and US digital
media buying?
NT: We haven't seen too many noticeable differences in the types of campaigns that are being run yet, other than
that UK and European campaigns are conspicuously following the same pattern and trends than North America
experienced several years ago. For example, we're seeing a lot of "Brand DR" campaigns initially (campaigns with
clear measurable goals that also have a significant brand component), which is to be expected. One of the biggest
differences that I believe will evolve over time will be centered around the laws and regulations of the region and
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how that affects the media buying process. How buyers are able to use and interact with cookie-level data and how
that impacts audience-based buying will be fascinating to see evolve, and no doubt will be different than North
America.
By John Ebbert
January 4, 2010 – 12:15 pm
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Invite Media On RTB And Online Display Ad Media Buying
Today
Email This Post
February 1, 2010 – 7:01 am
Demand-side platform Invite Media issued a release today
about its real-time biddable inventory sources which include
AdBrite, AdMeld and PubMatic. Read the release.
Invite Media COO Nat Turner discussed some of the
intricacies of online media buying today with
AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: You discuss buying "brand-safe"
inventory in your release. How do you determine whether
inventory is brand-safe? And is their any special
complexity when buying in real-time, spot market inventory?
NT: The beauty of real-time bidding is that there are very few layers between the advertiser and the publisher,
which means that if the publisher is amendable to being transparent, chances are a technology like ours can give
buyers the option on what they'd like to buy. Today, the "brand safe" category to us is comprised of both our
internal ranking and audit that we perform on every site as well as any information that the exchange (or pub
aggregator) provides. Our platform also allows buyers to selectively build their own list (or remove sites from ours)
if they have a different definition of what "brand safe" means to them.
Generally speaking, what are the differences between buying through an aggregator such as AdMeld or
PubMatic and the exchanges like DoubleClick and Right Media? Any differences in transparency, for
example?
To us, there are very few differences in buying across the various supply sources. To put it plainly, there will simply
be different approaches companies take to aggregating publisher inventory. You'll have the traditional ad
exchanges that we all know and love, but then you'll also have the aggregators who take a slightly different
approach to working with
publishers. Like with any market, you'll see differences across these sources in terms of transparency, average
pricing, etc... Today, we're seeing a high-degree of transparent and brand-safe inventory across the board and
have been pleasantly surprised to see even more come through the aggregators. I think that's a function of the
high-touch support, strong technology, and nimbleness that these companies provide to publishers.
What percentage of the inventory you buy today is real-time bidded? Where do you see this by the end of
the year? Can you discuss and quantify the performance difference you're seeing with RTB inventory vs.
non-RTB inventory?
A large majority of the inventory that clients buy on our platform today is via real-time bidding. I'd only expect that
to grow, especially as non-RTB exchanges and inventory sources move closer to launching their own RTB
integrations. A big part of that trend is that the performance difference of RTB vs. non-RTB is significant. Due to
the ability to perform actions such as universal frequency capping, optimization in real-time across multiple
sources, and leveraging of increased transparency have consistently delivered performance boosts of 2-3x
compared to non-RTB/traditional buying. While there are frankly way too many ways to slice and dice and compare
results given all of the factors present in display, there truly is a huge performance increase that can be garnered
by RTB.
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By John Ebbert
February 1, 2010 – 7:01 am
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LucidMedia Joins The Demand-Side Platform Race;
Announces ADvisor DSP
January 21, 2010 – 7:26 am
The demand-side platform (DSP) leaderboard just added
another competitor as LucidMedia says publicly for the first time
that it, too, has a DSP solution - in fact, they've had it for over a
year now according to the company.
With more details on the way in the coming weeks, LucidMedia CEO Ajay Sravanapudi discussed demand-side
platforms, LucidMedia's solution as well as the platform's real-time bidding (RTB) capabilities.
AdExchanger.com: What are the "must haves" for a DSP and why?
AS: The key "must haves" for a large agency looking to deploy a successful demand-side platform (DSP) initiative
are: multi-source real-time bidding (RTB) integration and scale, an advanced ad server, audience and contextual
targeting, universal frequency capping, detailed reporting with discrepancy management and reconciliation, brand
safe filtering, smart bidding strategies, the ability to leverage 3rd party targeting data, and managed services.
Properly integrated real-time bidding is not standardized or modularized. There is still a great deal of heavy lifting
development needed to bring on each inventory source, balance the volume, and bid effectively. A good DSP
needs to solve these problems. Smart bidding strategies are also critical. The DSP model promises that agencies
can claim a larger slice of the ad spend dollar but, without intelligent and flexible bidding, that slice may not be fully
realized. Agencies should look for RTB solutions efficient enough to drive bid costs below $0.001.
The concept of an agency-side buying and management platform relies heavily on managed services at the
inception of any in-house DSP program. The current transitional period is favoring the managed service approach
to demand-side platforms as agencies step into the traditional ad network role. Agencies are finding the networks
played a large role in accepting the media risk and owning the optimization of a campaign. As agencies become
buy-side networks they sometimes find they need additional campaign execution talent, potentially offsetting the
efficiencies that drove them to the DSP model in the first place. Managed services allow the transition and
knowledge transfer to happen in the most effective manner.
AdExchanger.com: What about the LucidMedia solution... how will your DSP differentiate from the current
entrants in the space?
Our experience and technology are our biggest differentiators. It is no secret that LucidMedia offers some of the
most robust contextual targeting in the marketplace, but what we have been able to achieve with our platform in
the last couple of years has not been widely publicized. Late in 2008 we began engaging with all of the large
aggregators to co-develop real-time bidding solutions. We next developed an advanced new breed of proprietary
ad server, where changes rollout in seconds instead of hours, giving us one of the most nimble systems available
for trafficking campaigns. We also built a unified inventory management system that could dispense with the
complexity of continually hard-wiring campaigns to the best possible inventory source. We included an automated
optimization engine that could evaluate thousands of campaign facets in real-time, predict performance, and
govern campaign targeting based on client goals. In January of 2009 we deployed the platform internally,
effectively making it the first production RTB-enabled demand-side platform. Named ADvisor DSP, it has since
been proven with over 10 billion impressions and hundreds of successful campaigns which makes us one of the
most experienced DSP providers.
We are unique from a technological standpoint as well. Obviously a good DSP starts with an advanced ad sever.
While core ad serving capabilities like frequency capping, day parting, and targeting are minimum requirements
and basic ad servers like DART or Atlas are good at providing these features, the savvy agency needs more
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holistic campaign management. Our proprietary ad server was built from scratch to support critical DSP features
like universal frequency capping, robust auditing, brand-safe filtering, and hyper-targeting to pages and users.
Discrepancy management and reconciliation, Atlas Universal Action Tag (UAT) compliance, and intrinsic support
for the new breed of engaging rich media solutions from companies like EyeWonder, PointRoll, and Oggi Finogi
are also supported in our ad server. Agencies should look closely at how risk factors such as discrepancies and
click fraud are handled and evaluate the reconciliation process available within the system.
Scalability is another key differentiator. ADvisor plugs into all the large repositories like Yahoo RightMedia, Google
Ad Exchange, AOL, and AdBrite as well as the aggregators like Adify, AdMeld, and OpenX, plus the supply-side
optimizers like Rubicon Project and PubMatic, giving it an unprecedented 45 billion impression potential and 95%
reach into the online population. This kind of scale and broad reach are obvious requirements for large direct
response or branding promotions. But it is also required to deliver narrowly targeted campaigns where massive
reach is needed to scale niche segments and deliver the correct volume to a specific demographic.
AdExchanger.com: In general, how do feel the inventory sources will break-out for the LucidMedia DSP?
We see the vast majority of the media flowing through our DSP solution will come in via RTB sources. While the
need for direct publisher buys or network inventory may always exist, RTB is the future and is by far the most
efficient way to acquire media at scale. To understand this you have to look at the larger trends in the industry.
2010 is already shaping up to be the year of RTB-enabled DSPs. The availability of real-time bid access into the
major ad exchanges is converging with an industry-wide preference for agency-administered ad-buying and adtrafficking platforms. The traditional ad network model achieved many things but has yet to deliver on the promise
of truly cost-effective scale. The rules of engagement changed when downward-spiraling CPM prices forced
publishers grudgingly onto the emerging exchanges to improve their yield and backfill diminishing ad revenues.
The networks had to follow their publishers and a new aggregated sourcing model emerged.
Real-time bidding is the hot feature this year and a staple of the effective DSP. Now the combined capabilities of
RTB and DSP built on the exchange model are replacing traditional ad networks with a new paradigm that is more
nimble, more economical, and more in touch with advertiser goals. Control is subsequently moving closer to the
advertiser, intermediation is being reduced, and prices are arriving at a true market-driven equilibrium. Not only do
advertisers have more control over targeting, performance, and safety, but buying has become more centralized
and access to inventory has become more streamlined. That’s really the promise of the demand-side platform with
real-time bidding.
By John Ebbert
January 21, 2010 – 7:26 am
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MediaMath CEO Zawadzki Discusses Adroit Interactive
Acquisition
April 16, 2010 – 12:10 am
MediaMath announced its acquisition of Adroit Interactive, an advertising
technology company specializing in multi-variate creative, also known as
dynamic ads. Read the release.
MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki discussed the acquisition and Adroit's
technology.
AdExchanger.com: For the creatives - such as those at creative agencies-,
how do you make the case for Adroit's technology being additive to their
creative process rather than trying to replace them?
JZ: Dynamic creative doesn’t replace the creative process itself. All of the “neck
up” work done by creative agencies remains – design of all the base templates
and each of the elements within it – offer, call-to-action, layout, etc. What dynamic creative does is automate the
re-assembly of those elements to unlock the maximum value. Like any algorithm, it’s only as good as the inputs
delivered by the creative agencies.
In practice, marketers typically don’t fund thousands of creatives developed by hand, so it’s not replacing a current
profit center. This is really about using technology to do the (otherwise prohibitive) heavy lifting of multivariate
testing to extract the most value from a given set of assets. In fact, we believe that creating a feedback loop back
to the agency will actually increase their value add, by delivering actionable insights about opportunities and white
space to inform the next round of strategic, “big idea” thinking.
Among DSPs at this time, is MediaMath the only Adroit client? Will Adroit services be offered (or continue
to be offered) to other demand-side platforms?
Absolutely. Adroit is operating as a separate business unit, and Greg (Smith, CEO of Adroit) would certainly like to
see other DSPs using the technology.
Similarly, MediaMath’s account teams don’t get incentivized to sell or recommend Adroit.
MediaMath the parent is absolutely committed to using other dynamic creative solutions – our mission is to deliver
the best enterprise-class platform, which means interoperability with everyone in the ecosystem given a wide
range of client needs.
Was this an all-stock deal or were there cash considerations?
Mix.
What other synergies exist between the two companies that you may not have had a chance to mention in
the release?
The real jewel in the technology that Adroit built is the flexibility of its rules engine. It allows for complex
"expression building." Users can basically program as intricate a set of rules as they like, e.g., "users from New
York should see creative A during the day and creative B after-work, unless they have seen either one more than
twice, in which case they should see creative C." Moreover, we’re able to drive Adroit’s decisioning with
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MediaMath’s Brain (our proprietary optimization engine) without refactoring either code base, so the algorithms
could learn exactly which version to assemble in order to deliver response based on both "creative and
"media/audience" data in parallel.
It’s a cool enough capability that we could plug this export into other dynamic creative solutions. For example, use
PointRoll’s creative management and presentation layer based on the output of MediaMath’s Brain plus Adroit
dynamic creative rules engine. Or perhaps use it drive a basic bid-management-type DSP.
By John Ebbert
April 16, 2010 – 12:10 am
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OwnerIQ Using Insights On Ownership Signals For
Targeting Says CEO Habegger
March 5, 2010 – 8:47 am
Jay Habegger is CEO of ownership targeting company, OwnerIQ.
AdExchanger.com: How did OwnerIQ begin?
JH: OwnerIQ was born out a few simple insights. Effective
advertising is presenting the right message to the consumer
that resonates and influences perceptions or compels actions.
Our first insight, supported by research, is that knowing about
a person’s stuff tells a lot about what the right message is for a
particular consumer; we believe that you are what you own. A
second important insight is that we could get at ownership
information of consumer durable goods in a reliable and
scalable way by tagging consumers as they participate in both
shopping and owning experiences. To make these two insights
actionable we built a software platform that would allow us to
manage the myriad of “ownership signals” we acquire on
consumers, group these together in meaningful ways for
advertisers and acquire media to execute campaigns.
Does it all come down to in-market data? Can behavioral
advertising work with a more macro approach such as
demographic data?
In-Market data is useful and valuable. Working with our
manufacturer partners OwnerIQ is able to deliver some of the
most reliable and strongest in-market data for consumer
durable goods. But, in-market is far from the entire picture.
The focus on in-market data is further evidence that the measurability of all things online has allowed DR, bottomof-the-funnel, advertising to drive the entire agenda. Once a consumer is in-market and has already defined a
consideration, the ability of an advertiser to change the outcome is very limited as the consumer is now about
comparing the items that made it into the consideration set, or even just price and availability shopping on a single
item in that set. Thus, the role of in-market data is naturally limited on bottom-of-the-funnel conversions. Absolutely
a valuable objective for many advertisers, such as etailers, – but it isn’t the only objective for most advertisers.
Most advertisers would be better served by focusing on getting in the consideration set in the first place, or even
changing the parameters that define how the products in the consideration set are selected by the consumer. We
believe that ownership data, intelligently applied to create specific targeted audiences and combined with
demographic data, allows an advertiser to achieve top-of-funnel objectives better than other approaches of
defining audiences.
How does OwnerIQ address creative? For example, do you offer optimization services for the creative or is
that the responsibility of the client?
We have different classes of customers. We’re bringing a lot of new online display advertisers into the market,
such as manufacturers. For these customers we try to be as helpful as possible in generating creative, dynamic
ads and optimization. For our sophisticated advertising customers that employ a creative agency we typically have
the creative handed to us. We will do optimization on a campaign, of course. Optimizing ownership signals that we
use to target the advertising for example.
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However, there is a larger question for the entire industry: as we acquire more data and deploy the management
and media buying systems to use it at ever more refined levels the model for generating creative – a one size fits
all approach with slow cycle times for changes – is increasingly inadequate. Although there are companies today
that do dynamic ads for products, including us, they are really about product and offer cycling and not about
changing the emphasis of a particular creative for a top-of-funnel advertiser. For example, we’ve run campaigns for
retailers where the creative agency insists on using the exact same creative to simultaneously target in-market
buyers, duress buyers and influencing the consideration set. That just can’t be the right answer, yet the economics
of the current process dictate that anything else is prohibitive. All the capability we’ve built up as an industry to
better manager online display advertising is being hobbled by our version of the “last mile problem”: the creative.
We’re focused on this problem and on solving it for our advertisers using Ownership Targeting.
What trends is OwnerIQ seeing in the marketplace today?
This is an incredibly dynamic time to be in online display advertising. So many things are changing so rapidly. I just
returned from the IAB Leadership conference. The number of attendees almost doubled from the 2009 to the 2010
meeting which indicates a very dynamic eco-system.
Having said that, the most important trend, and it sweeps up many things, is the trend toward buying a precise
audience and not being constrained by the demographics of a particular site. Making this possible is the trend
toward impression-by-impression inventory acquisition and decision making. We were early leaders in real-timebidding access and made that a corner-stone of how we execute campaigns for advertisers. Another trend is the
unbundling of cookie data from advertising inventory itself. It is almost as if we all woke up one day and discovered
that the real-estate we were all familiar (display ads on websites) with had valuable mineral rights too (the cookies
that could be sent the consumer and read mined later for better targeting). Now we’re trying to figure out how to
profitably leverage the mineral rights.
What's your view on ad exchanges? Good for advertising?
More efficient marketplaces are always a good thing. Exchanges have enabled businesses and capabilities that
were not even possible just a few years ago. For example, without exchanges we wouldn’t be seeing the migration
toward the precise packaging of audiences that we’re seeing now.
I also think this trend can be a huge benefit for publishers – especially quality long-tail publishers that have had to
inefficiently sell their inventory through ad networks. I know that through our real-time-bidding systems we are
absolutely willing to pay extremely high CPMs for our target audience on a quality, brand-safe sites and I don’t
think we are unique in having that perspective. On exchanges that offer us the transparency to see where we are
bidding we have our software programmed to do this. Increased efficiency allows us to raise our bids for quality
while bidding down the price of junk. Lack of transparency acts like a Gresham’s Law of inventory: bad inventory
drives out good. For this reason I’m encouraged at the stance that Yahoo has taken with RMX and tried to
increase the quality, but I think all exchanges and publishers would be better served by rapidly making full
transparency the norm.
Who owns the data? Given recent terms & conditions changes by some agencies, how do you see data
ownership breaking out in the future?
The first thing that always seems to get lost in this debate is that the consumers own the data in any meaningful
sense. The cookie is a file sitting on their computer totally under their control. They can edit it, tell their browser not
to send it and delete it at any time. Any notion of ownership of cookie data by anybody else is tenuous at best.
The only things that can be controlled are who is licensed to put code on a web page that results in a cookie being
sent to a consumer and who owns the keys to decoding the information in a cookie. When looked at from this
perspective I actually don’t think the question of ownership per se is that difficult: the publisher clearly has all the
rights in the world to decide who can drop cookies from their web pages and under what terms and conditions and
the service provider dropping the cookie clearly owns the intellectual property on how to decode the information in
those cookies unless it was created as a work for hire by the publisher.
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I think the real question – and the locus of concern – around this question is more about open disclosure. Too
many companies are using bits of code and widgets that seem to perform a neat function as a Trojan Horse to
actually acquire data from publishers and often do so entirely without their knowledge. Terms and conditions for
these measurement, sharing, or other widgets are notoriously vague about how the information collected is going
to be used. Perform a simple test. Go ask your typical webmaster who installed one of these measurement
services on their site if they know the data collected is being used for advertising and I’ll bet you 9 out of 10 of
them will be surprised to discover that it is. That’s the problem in a nutshell from my perspective.
Any concerns for you and OwnerIQ regarding potential regulation around privacy?
Invasive regulation on the use of cookies for ad targeting would be bad for OwnerIQ and every other online
advertising business I know of. It is just an incredibly bad and short-sighted idea. It's going to be bad for
consumers, it's going to be bad for publishers and it's going to be bad for advertisers. This will be bad for
consumers because they are going to have a lot less online choice and quality. Almost every online innovation has
sustained itself with advertising including free email, free news, and free social networking. Even Twitter isn’t a
public service project; it will have to develop an advertising model and support itself eventually or it will cease to
exist. This will be bad for publishers because without being able to introduce advertising products that add more
value they are going to restrict services, kill innovation and actually subject consumers to poorly targeted ads and
lots more of them because the lack of targeting will kill CPMs and the publishers that survive will have to run more
volume. This will be bad for advertisers because the consumer they want to reach is increasingly online and they
won’t have the tools to reach them.
Surveys of consumers by privacy advocates focus on asking consumers if they want to be targeted with
advertising, but they never seem to ask the obvious alternative: do they want to pay for things they now get for
free? Ask them if they want to pay $0.05 for every Google search they do, or $0.10 for every email they get. I
suspect they would far prefer a relevant ad served up to them on something they were already shopping for.
Follow OwnerIQ (@OwnerIQ) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 5, 2010 – 8:47 am
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Simpli.fi Addressing Search Marketers With A DemandSide Platform Says CEO Prioleau
March 2, 2010 – 8:53 am
Frost Prioleau and Paul Harrison are CEO and CTO, respectively,
of Simpli.fi, a demand-side platform for search marketers.
AdExchanger.com: Let's look back, first. The last company
you both were involved in was Personifi. Can you give us a
brief history? And then discuss how your Personifi experience
has informed the creation of Simpl.fi?
Harrison: Actually, the last company that we were both involved
with was Collective Media which acquired Personifi in 2008.
Collective is an ad network and technology company that offers
audience solutions to advertisers, agencies, and publishers.
Collective was one of the first customers of Personifi’s contextual
and behavioral targeting solution, and acquired Personifi in order to
integrate Personifi’s targeting platform into Collective’s Ad network
Management Platform, which is called AMP.
Collective is the best in the business at aggregating audiences for
brand advertisers, so it was a great place for us to see the power of
combining great technology with the right market vision and
customer service.
As we set out to build Simpli.fi, we drew from lots of good experience and learning at Collective, including:
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Audience targeting is hard work and there is a steep learning curve to get it right.
Data quality and relationships are very important.
Audience capture, value and bid technology have evolved significantly over the past
couple of years. We feel we’re in our third iteration of this with Simpli.fi
How did Don Epperson, the former global CEO of Havas Digital, get involved?
Prioleau: We have known Don for a few years, and have always been impressed by his vision in this space. After it
was announced that Paul and I were leaving Collective, we started talking with Don about joining forces.
We were already focusing on building a DSP for Search Marketers, and it turned out that Don’s long term vision for
how this space will evolve is very much in sync with ours.
We are thrilled to work with Don as he adds a ton of value with his experience, his understanding of the online ad
space, and his worldwide relationships. But probably most importantly, we just like Don and felt that he’d be a
great partner to work with.
As our Executive Chairman, Don is focusing on strategy, business development, and corporate development. As
CEO, I am focused on general management of the company. And our CTO, Paul is responsible for overall
development of our platform.
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With our mix of both demand side and supply side experiences, as well as deep understanding of the technologies
applicable to the space, we feel like we have the nucleus of a very strong team.
And now you're in Simpl.fi. You were Personifi. What's with the "fi", anyway? You guys marines? - Semper
Fi!
Prioleau: We can only hope to be as good as Marines!
Harrison: The name Simpli.fi rang true for us because we believe that in order for the DSP space to grow to its
potential, we need to make our solutions simple for advertisers to use and understand. So while we use very
advanced...and complicated...technologies, we are all about making our solutions simple for end users to work
with.
Summarize the problem that Simpli.fi will be solving.
Harrison: Search is expensive, and in many cases search marketers cannot reach as many searchers as they
would like. So we are focused on solving key problems for search marketers that include:
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The high cost of reaching audiences who have searched on popular keywords.
The difficulty of reaching users who have searched on targeted keywords but have not
clicked on the advertiser's organic or paid search results
The lack opportunities to advertise to searchers once they have left the search engine's
results page....which is 95% of the time.
Sophisticated search marketers have a very good understanding of the value of each keyword, and we are
providing them with an incremental way to reach more of their target audience while maximizing the ROI on their
advertising spend and gaining insights into their targeted audience.
In a nutshell, we allow search marketers to reach more users with more frequency, and often with less expense.
We also solve problems for owners of search data, in that we provide a monetization platform that allows them to
both to generate revenue from their data and also to gain valuable insights into the value of their data on a
keyword by keyword level.
With the use of search keywords, what makes Simpli.fi different than what companies like Domdex and
Kontera are doing?
Harrison: While I don't know exactly what Domdex and Kontera are doing, many companies use search keywords
in a variety of ways. Our goal is to provide search marketers with a way to reach more searchers more efficiently,
with the keyword-level targeting, bidding, and reporting that they are accustomed to from their search campaigns.
Also, we are allowing advertisers upload the same keyword lists that they use for search campaigns, and to bid
display inventory that is seen by users who have recently searched on their specific keywords.
By doing this they can reach users who have never clicked on their organic or paid search results, and leverage
the knowledge that they have built from their search campaigns.
Should we think of you as a Demand Side Platform (DSP) -and does Realt-Time Bidding (RTB) fit in here?
Prioleau: Yes…we are a Demand Side Platform (DSP) specially built for search marketers. Our platform uses real
time bidding to access inventory from the major ad optimizers and exchanges.
Who, or what type of companies will work with and use Simpli.fi's products and services?
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Prioleau: We are initially working with search marketers who are feeling the pain of high CPCs and low reach, and
are looking for new ways to increase the return on their campaigns.
We are also working with publishers and other companies who own search data and are interested in generating
revenue from that data. In addition to revenue, we can provide valuable insights into the value and audience for
each keyword.
What about financing and investors? Any news imminent news here?
Prioleau: We are self-funded to date, and will bring on appropriate institutional investors once the product is out of
beta.
What's your thinking about the publisher side? What should they be doing these days and Is there
anything in your offering for publishers?
Harrison: I think that Publishers need to decide how much of their inventory that they want to sell retail vs.
wholesale. Either they can lean towards retail, and hire a sales force and extend their reach via partnerships with
DSPs, exchanges, and/or other publishers. Or...then can choose wholesale, forego a salesforce, and leverage the
capabilities of optimizers, exchanges, and/or networks to maximize the value of their inventory.
Prioleau: Publishers with valuable audiences also have the option to generate significant incremental revenue from
their audience data....something that many publishers are not taking advantage of today.
When do you expect to have something ready to test?
Prioleau: We are in the midst of working with initial clients, exchanges, and data providers and integrating their
feedback. We plan on taking a deliberate approach to market, and should be in full commercialization mode by late
spring/early summer.
One year from now, what are you some key milestones that you would like to have achieved?
Prioleau: One year from now we would like to be working successfully with some of the largest and most
sophisticated search marketers, we would like to be well known as a brand that connotes knowledge and industryleading technology, and we would like to have 100% reach...evaluating all available RTB bid requests on all
exchanges.
Follow Simpli.fi (@simpli_fi) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 2, 2010 – 8:53 am
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Triggit To Open Real-Time Bidding To All Advertisers Says
CEO Coelius
February 18, 2010 – 3:32 pm
Triggit announced its new self-service, demand-side platform for online display advertising today. Read more on
TechCrunch.
AdExchanger.com spoke to Triggit CEO Zach Coelius about the launch and his expectations for the product.
AdExchanger.com: How different is this new platform then what you have been running to date?
ZC: Our launch today is the beta version of our Real-Time Bidding (RTB) platform for marketers and their
agencies. It is a dramatic improvement on the alpha version we pushed out to clients a couple months ago. It
enables clients to set-up, target and control their campaigns with a fully self-service interface. The key difference is
that we are starting to put the full power of RTB into the hands of marketers. This means clients can use their own
retargeting values, audience segments and third party data from leading providers to transparently buy media
across all the major RTB exchanges. With RTB, our clients are able to target down to specific sites while being
able to leverage the scale of the billions of available daily impressions. The platform also enables them to manage
universal frequency capping and see unified analytics, reporting and optimization.
We have been working hard for the last year to build the real time bidding technology that enables the power and
ease of use of this platform. We are excited to get it in the hands of new users and hear their feedback.
AdExchanger.com: When will this self-serve platform be widely available? Can anyone signup and use
this? If not, who's the target market?
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Our plan is to make the self-serve platform as widely available as possible. For the first few weeks we’ll be
managing the flow of new advertisers, but in the very near future we hope to be able to throw the doors open to
every one. Our goal is to make display advertising as easy to manage at scale as search, which ought to make our
platform useful for advertisers of all sizes.
Given advertisers are bidding in an exchange environment, can advertisers use verification/visibility
companies? Do you see as semantic or contextual data as an important bidding element?
I think one of the largest misconceptions in the market today is to equate all exchanges with the blind, cheap, and
poorly performing inventory that the last generation of exchanges used to provide. That is no longer the case. One
of the most important innovations with Real Time Bidding is that we bid on a transparent per impression basis.
What that means to the client is that we are able to provide them with full transparency into what sites are available
on the exchanges and let them choose where they would like their ads to run. For clients with brand sensitivity that
means we can restrict their campaigns to only run on highly reputable sites like CNN, Forbes, The NY Times or
Yahoo. For clients with more flexibility, they can take advantage of the lower prices of long tail inventory and run
across sites with a range of quality. The end result is that it is no longer about verification after a campaign has
run--instead it is about giving clients the ability to choose where their ads are to run before the campaign even
begins. Verification makes a ton of sense when you are working with an Ad Network that doesn’t give you ability to
choose where your ads run, and it makes less sense with RTB. Though if clients want to use verification we are
more then happy to support it.
We currently don’t use contextual or semantic data for targeting. We are actively exploring this at the moment and
we are looking forward to integrating with semantic and contextual partners and making their data accessible
through our platform.
Discuss your real-time attribution capabilities. What does Triggit offer? For example, can Triggit take
information from a conversion in real-time and inform the bidding process?
One of the most important jobs of our RTB Platform is to figure out what impressions to bid for and how much to
bid. On of the key drivers of that process is tracking every ad that we serve to every user, the interaction with those
ads and all of the downstream clicks, site interactions and conversions. That data is recorded and made available
to the bidder in real time so that the platform can constantly be adjusting its bids according to the results. In
computer geek speak that means we are doing almost as many writes as we are reads. This attribution process
also enables us to do some very interesting things with view-through and impression attribution to track and
analyze the brand building value of ads. We are really excited to build out these capabilities with our clients and
enable them to better evaluate and optimize the effectiveness of their display campaigns.
By John Ebbert
February 18, 2010 – 3:32 pm
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Turn Highlights IPG Cadreon Relationship, New Planning
Tools; CEO Demas Discusses Platform Updates
April 21, 2010 – 9:15 pm
In a release this week, Turn publicly highlighted its relationship with
ad holding company IPG's buying platform, Cadreon, as well as new
media planning tools integrated into the Turn platform for bid
forecasting and audience extension. Read more.
Bill Demas, CEO of Turn, discussed updates to the Turn buying
platform.
For Turn's platform, why are media planning tools becoming a
requirement in addition to media buying tools?
Media planning has always been critical. However, as publishers
employ auction marketplaces for display advertising inventory,
traditional planning strategies and tools - based on the concept of
guaranteed, up-front buys - used by agencies and marketers were no
longer effective. Traditional planning tools can’t forecast availability
for custom audience segments, cannot recommend what new targeting strategies should be employed, nor provide
pricing estimates to win bids for impression in real time in a word where there are no guarantees of delivery. To be
successful in this new world of display, media pros need real-time insights to be fully informed.
Turn’s new bid-forecasting and audience extender tools empower agencies and marketers to test various buying
scenarios against targeted audiences in an effort to reduce media waste. From the Turn platform, planners clearly
see how their targeting and bid price choices affect audience reach, optimum frequency, and bid estimates on
inventory across every real-time ad exchange. These new tools give them the power to play “what if” as they find
the optimum bid and targeting strategy.
Can Turn platform clients bring their own data and then use Turn to create look-alikes in the planning
process? If so can you share a use case of how this might work?
Turn’s customers can absolutely bring their own data into the platform solution. In fact, agencies and marketers
integrate traditional ‘retargeting’ data into the Turn platform as well as integrate in more sophisticated Customer
Relationship Management database information. This can include information like registration data, product
purchase history, or loyalty program tiers. It’s important to note that all data, regardless of source, is completely
anonymous and privacy compliant. Turn is a certified member of the NAI and follows industry best practices to
ensure consumer privacy.
One example of using look-alike modeling is identifying consumers who have successfully converted for the
advertiser over the past 90 days, and using the ‘audience extension’ tools, create look-alike audience segments
that find more consumers who look and behave like the advertiser’s existing audience. Thus, media planners can
use these new insights to pick and choose which look-alike segments they want to use, and leverage the bid
forecasting tools to find their preferred balance between increased audience reach and predicted performance.
With just a few more clicks, the planner can launch a campaign targeting the new audience, while excluding any
consumers who have previously converted for the advertiser.
A more sophisticated example would work in a similar way, but start with consumers who have not only converted
for the advertiser over the past 90 days, but who are also known to have been in the advertiser’s top loyalty
program tier at anytime in the past three years. This would dramatically refine the audience that the look-alike
modeling will be conducted against, leading to a smaller, but potentially much higher value set of consumers to
target.
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Let’s also note that agencies or marketers with high volume data can derive further benefits by using their own
data to help power the look-alike modeling itself. For example, if an agency has identified through its own
clickstream data collection and modeling a range of demographic and behavioral data points on consumers, that
proprietary data can be utilized like any other 3rd party data source to build new look-alike audience segments.
How do you merge planning with "real-time"? Is it possible to plan for a real-time marketplace?
Auction marketplaces are very powerful because they allow agencies and marketers to bid a different price for
every individual ad impressions in real time. Yet, this requires tools that provide real-time insights for fully-informed
decisions -- before the first impression is ever purchased. Another challenge for agencies or brands is the fact that
there is no ‘guarantee’ of delivery. Other buyers are also bidding for the same impressions, so the pricing and
availability for any one impression can change in real-time.
Turn’s planning tools utilize deep data mining to look at the history of which consumers and impressions have
been purchased on the exchanges in the past. Using advanced data mining and statistical analysis techniques,
the platform is able to provide the customer - whether media planner, executive, or someone else with a forecast of
audience reach, impression volume and consumer frequency at different bid price points. Planners can then
leverage this data in real time to evaluate whether different targeting strategies under consideration will have a
sufficient audience, and whether a given budget goal can be achieved. If the audience or impression volume is
NOT sufficient, the media planner is able to use the audience extension tools to adjust their strategies accordingly
and again, design successful campaigns BEFORE the first impression is served.
By John Ebbert
April 21, 2010 – 9:15 pm
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Turn Announces Agency Holding Company Client:
Omnicom Media Group; Upgrades Platform Features
January 26, 2010 – 9:08 am
Turn announced feature upgrades to its demand-side platform as well
as an agency holding company client win in Omnicom Media Group
in a release today. Regarding the upgrades, the company said,
"Capabilities include single-click deployment across all real-time
bidding (RTB) inventory sources, automated budget allocation and a
new audience extension technology." Read the release.
AdExchanger.com spoke to Turn CEO Bill Demas about the release
and industry trends.
AdExchanger.com: Beyond offering a "hard dollar" return on ad
spend, what other benefits does the Turn platform offer its
clients?
BD: Analytics is a big component. The platform includes a feature
rich Audience Insights module that provides detailed demographic
and psychographic audience profiling for campaigns. These analytics can be viewed during and after a campaign,
but many of our clients actually use it to analyze an advertiser's existing customers prior to the campaign
launching. The data is then used to help inform messaging strategies, creative design themes and media planning
across both exchanges and traditional guaranteed buys.
Image replaced 1/26/10
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For campaigns that are targeting a very niche audience, the Audience Extension module can be utilized to identify
additional, high performance 'act alike' audience segments. By finding these new audience segments, our clients
are able to go beyond just optimizing within the existing budget, to identifying whether the budget itself can be
increased!
For all platform clients, Turn also offers the added benefit of a full media services division (the Turn Network). This
team works with our clients to acquire additional inventory, when needed, from publishers that are not currently on
the exchanges. For campaigns that are reach and volume constrained even after deployment across all of the
exchanges and sell side optimizers, this can add significant incremental volume to the campaign while still
achieving performance objectives.
AdExchanger.com: As a startup, what are some of the keys to effectively meeting the needs of a holding
company initiative?
BD: Every holding company is unique in its strategy, objectives and the technology, data and service assets they
bring to the table. We are firm believers that being able to provide a highly customized technology and service
offering is key to meeting the needs of these clients. Our job is to provide a best-in-class media buying and
optimization platform to our clients, but at the end of the day, Turn is only one part of their unique solution.
AdExchanger.com: How important is the Turn ad network to helping fulfill client campaigns for a client
with significant buying scale such as Omnicom Media Group? How do you manage the perception that the
Turn ad network may compete with Turn demand-side platform's white-label clients?
BD: Today, not every publisher is on an exchange, and for the ones that are, not every impression is sold through
an exchange. Consequently there is a lot of high value inventory that simply can't be purchased through an
exchange or the sell side optimizers like AdMeld, Pubmatic or Rubicon.
For highly targeted campaigns that are reach constrained, Turn's media services works with them to acquire
additional inventory. What's really cool about this model is that the Turn DSP treats this inventory just like any
other RTB inventory source: if it meets the campaign's performance objectives the impression is utilized, otherwise
it's not. Consequently, Turn Network is purely complimentary to the other inventory sources. For our clients this is
a significant value-add because it provides incremental reach and volume. Also the whole process is fully
transparent, so there's never any question of it being competitive in any way.
By John Ebbert
January 26, 2010 – 9:08 am
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x+1’s Nardone Discusses Cookie-Level Integration Of
Brand Research Data
April 20, 2010 – 9:51 am
Last Friday, [x+1] announced a new partnership with Knowledge
Networks' KN Dimestore and a "tool that allows marketers to
enhance online ad campaign performance by adjusting offers and
media on the fly based on real-time consumer feedback." Read the
release.
[x+1] CEO John Nardone discussed the new tool and how it works.
AdExchanger.com: Can you discuss how you integrate the
qualitative results of the KN Dimestore survey into the
quantitative optimization of x+1's platform? And, what do you
tell clients in terms of set-up time?
JN: In real time, we have the ability, at the cookie level, to see
consumers response to a short form brand research survey and tie
all this data back to [X+1] data environment containing large
amounts of 3rd party audience attributes. This is truly revolutionary.
For the first time ever we will be able to view our client’s customers in a different light, as different segments and
adjust the campaign based on that data. For example, if we use the survey to understand where consumers are in
the purchase funnel, we can segment and build different targeting models using [X+1]’s extensive database for
folks that are near purchase or further from a purchase. We can understand in real time where a user is in the
purchase funnel, re-target them with specific messaging and move them closer to a purchase and eventually get
them to buy. Adding the qualitative data to the rest of [x+1]’s capabilities allows us to think of customers in a much
different light and actually act upon it. Set up time is not a factor – it won’t take more than a day or so get this
started as part of a campaign.
Why would a consumer want to take a KN Dimestore brand survey? Are they incentivized?
JN: People like to share their opinions, plain and simple. We don’t believe in incentivizing consumers as this may
skew the results. KN Dimestore makes it easy for people to fill out the survey, leading to substantially higher
response rates and more data to work with. Through this partnership, surveys are within the ad placement and do
not require a person to leave the page they are on to complete it. Filling out 3-6 questions on a page they are
already on is much less disruptive than other offerings, and shouldn’t take more than 30 seconds to a minute of
anyone’s time.
Do advertiser clients need to contract with KN Dimestore directly or do they go through x+1? How is this
billed to the advertiser?
Advertiser clients do not need to contract separately with KN Dimestore. [x+1] works directly with KN Dimestore on
behalf of the advertiser to do everything from the upfront definition of campaign goals and specification to
implementation and execution. Advertisers will not get a separate bill for adding a survey into their media buy.
When used, the service is included as part of our product offering as a value add.
Will you use KN Dimestore brand survey data to assist with attribution modeling for x+1 clients? If not,
how will you measure brand impact?
We see this data as another arrow in our data quiver. Survey results data can be used to segment customers and
place them into different parts of the purchase funnel. Typically, attribution is defined as what drove a conversion
event, which is usually defined as a sale. KN Dimestore technology allows us to capture additional and new types
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of conversions. Moving a customer from unaware to aware, from awareness to intent, and from intent to an actual
purchase are all now available to us if we use the right kind of questions. This data becomes the fuel for different
types of attribution analysis – which ads were better at driving awareness, which drove more purchase intent. Now
we can start attributing ad impact to more than just a sale, but to all of the stages that lead up to a sale, and use
that data to fine tune the campaign while it is still in market – when it can actually make an impact.
By John Ebbert
April 20, 2010 – 9:51 am
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CEO Nardone Discusses Merkle, X+1 Partnership And
Customer-Centric Marketing
April 8, 2010 – 8:41 am
Following up Merkle's presentation at the NexTargeting event
hosted by [x+1] in March, demand-side platform, [x+1]. announced
a broad partnership with customer relationship marketing agency,
Merkle, as "the two companies will provide marketers with a truly
integrated, analytics-based multichannel approach to customer
acquisition." Read the release.
John Nardone, Chairman and CEO of [x+1], discussed the new
partnership and its implications.
AdExchanger.com: Can you discuss why x+1's partnership with Merkle is significant?
JN: It’s significant because the partnership will immediately add value for marketers who take a customer centric
approach to marketing because they understand the value of a customer database. With this partnership,
marketers can leverage the thinking that they apply to traditional CRM channels digital. They are expanding their
capabilities, their reach, touch points and the impact of the customer centric strategies.
Companies aside, how is a CRM agency a good fit for a DSP's capabilities and visa versa?
I can't speak to DSP's in general. It’s a perfect and natural fit for us because our platforms ability to leverage
customer data. With Merkle, we solve the problem CMO’s have been facing which is how to take a holistic
approach to marketing communications and leveraging their customer databases across channels.
How is the Merkle/[x+1] partnership going to uniquely address attribution and the understanding of
ROAS?
This is the first step in breaking down between the traditional silos of direct and digital. We recognize that there
has been a challenge of attribution modeling across channel because of soiled data. The Merkle and [x+1]
partnership will ensure that the channels that Merkle is tracking and [x+1] is addressing are seamlessly merged for
marketers. This should allow for a more a more accurate attribution model to be developed that will enhance a
marketer’s channel and communication strategy.
AdExchanger.com: What's the target market for the two companies with this deal? Do you go after
particular brands, CPG, big budgets, etc.?
All companies, including Merkle’s and [x+1]’s blue chip clients, who have as their core mission a goal to serve their
customer with relevant messaging will be excited and find value from this partnership. To us and Merkle, it’s less
about the size of a marketer’s budget and more about the size of their commitment to customer-centric, datadriven marketing.
By John Ebbert
April 8, 2010 – 8:41 am
94
Demand-Side Platform X+1 Speaks: On New Product And Insights On Data
February 2, 2010 – 3:01 pm
Last week, demand-side platform, [x+1], announced Open Data Bridge which
it says gives advertisers the ability to "simply integrate and use client and third
party data for online targeting." Read the release.
Ken Rona, VP of Data Strategy and Analytics at [x+1] discussed the new
product as well as provided insights on the uses of data today.
AdExchanger.com: What are some of the key differentiators of Open
Data Bridge in comparison to your demand-side platform competition?
For example, many DSPs offer access to TARGUSinfo, Datalogix,
eXelate, BlueKai, etc.
KR:
1. A major component of the ODB is that it allows you to quickly and simply make any third party data (not
just those that we are integrated with) or custom data source (that can be matched online) available for
targeting. Clients and agencies can bring their own data relationships. We have developed technologies to
make the loading and use of the data into our platform very simple. For many marketers, a valuable
differentiator is their own customer data, and now, the value of that data can be unlocked by ODB.
2. Unique to the platform is multivariate targeting. The platform allows you to mix, match and combine data
sources.
3. The platform also does a series of quality control steps to ensure that the data is being loaded correctly
and has the proper amount of consistency. Different data elements have different levels of consistency.
For example, we don’t expect that most people are consistently in the market for a vacation, but we would
expect that most people’s income is fairly stable.
4. All of the data can be made available to the POE engine for optimization, which automatically finds the
relevant data from all the sources and builds custom models for each client and customer.
5. The data can be used across our site optimization and media optimization solutions. This is a unique
capability that allows us to optimize up and down the purchase funnel. So, we can create different
customer experiences based on the data we used to do media optimization. This allows the marketer a
"single view" of the customer.
Discuss [x+1]'s experience with data providers as it relates to the following: are you finding that data has a
shelf life? Can you share any experience here? Perhaps shelf life for Travel shoppers, etc.?
KR: As you could guess, shelf life is less about the provider and more on the customer as represented by data. We
just used in-market for home electronics to good effect, but we did not go back and show ads to people who
converted to see if they would convert again (grin). So, in-market for some categories has a natural shelf life.based
on if the product category is durable goods or if it is a considered purchase, etc. Much of the 3rd party data that we
have brought into the first phase Bridge is based on demographics and lifestyle segments. Those are fairly stable.
Shelf life is less of a problem than the "level" of the data; The problem with some online data is that it is not keyed
to users. It is keyed to a computer or a HH, or even worse a zip code. Even targeting on a Zip+4 can provide
meaningless data, depending on the variable. For example, it does not make sense to target gender on the basis
of a zip4. The ratio of men to women does not change much at the z4 level; It changes at the user level. So, when
talking to the data providers, you need to ask very explicit questions about what the level the data is on and
understand that the campaign results you are getting might be due to the fact that you are targeting based on the
household, not the user.
Where is the opportunity with social targeting today? Is it all about look alikes?
95
KR: It’s an important challenge because marketers are looking for social to generate real success this year. The
quick answer is: Not all. For me, the bigger opportunity is in audience expansion. Let me back up. There are two
types of data that could be thought of as "social targeting." The first is for audience expansion: like Media6 or
33Accross offer their media clients. We use a xGraph to place a tag on a seed user and then they provide me a list
of user IDs who are friends with that seed user. For campaigns where there is a natural community, this approach
works great. For example, if you want to reach stamp collectors or people that work at a specific company, using
social media for audience expansion makes sense. These people have a reason to be connected that supports
your campaign. By contrast, I have a hard time thinking about using social media to expand an audience for
vacuum cleaners. People buy vacuums when they need one, not generally because their friends just bought one or
are really into vacuums. Now that I think of it, I can think of a way to expand the audience for vacuum cleaners, but
it would be a small audience. I’ll post my idea in the comments section in a couple of days to let your readers make
some suggestions.
The second use of social targeting data is what Lotame and Rapleaf offer. They extract users' interests (and some
personal characteristics) and tie that data back to a user ID. This is targeting derived from social media. It's also a
valid way to target, but at this point, the audiences are a little thin. This is getting better all the time, though and I
expect that in the future this will be very powerful in finding extremely targeted audiences. We are actively using
both types of data.
By John Ebbert
February 2, 2010 – 3:01 pm
96
X+1 CEO Nardone On Update To Company’s Demand-Side
Platform Technology
March 18, 2010 – 9:38 am
X+1 announced that it has added new features to its demand-side platform.
Read the release.
X+1 CEO John Nardone discussed the recent updates to his company's
platform and demand-side platforms, in general.
Why is a universal tag a step forward? Can you give some background
as to what marketers have been used to?
JN: Our universal “Smart Tag System” is a big advance for several reasons:
1)
It simplifies client implementation and reduces the need for IT staff time.
First, there is only one tag which works for both site optimization and for media. Then, the exact same tag is
implemented on every single page, so that the client does not have to keep track of which tag is where. This
allows it to be automatically inserted into the header or footer of the web pages. It also reduces test time. Since it
is always the same, IT staff can be comfortable with spot checking, rather than testing every single page the tag
sits on.
2)
It reduces maintenance headaches.
Once in place, the tag does not have to be changed, even if page content changes. The “meaning” of the tag can
be changed through our UI without the intervention of IT. And since it is a container, the marketer or agency can
use it to place other tags within it – again, without IT support.
3)
The tags allow you to “pull” data through into the [x+1] platform for site or media targeting.
The tag can accept data parameters that are then available for targeting. This might be the contents of an
abandoned shopping cart, the dollar value of an order or the loyalty status of a customer. The data is then
available for targeting, either through rules or through the automated POE optimization engine.
4)
You can automate rules based on the tag.
Since the tags in the Smart Tagging System are linked to the [x+1] platform’s rules engine, you can write rules for
site content or ad presentation based on the tags. For instance, if a consumer is seen at both tag A and tag B,
your rule might say, “Serve content X on the next page request.” Or, if a consumer is seen at tag A, but does not
convert (i.e., is not seen at tag C), then the rule might say “Remarket to that user in display, beginning three hours
after last contact, with a frequency cap of two times per day, at a price of no more than $3 per thousand, for the
next five days.”
The new tagging feature seems to be not only for advertisers who are optimizing their landing pages, but
could be something for publishers. Any thoughts of expanding to the supply side?
Publishers are definitely interested in the [x+1] platform. In fact we have several publishers as clients already,
though for the most part they use our platform as marketers (yes, publishers market their property and have
products to sell). We have just begun to pilot more comprehensive solutions for publishers, and have had some
early success. We expect to bring them to market as we build the options into the user interface.
97
Can you address when clients will be able to buy audience that includes other digital channels beyond
display - specifically video and mobile?
Clients will be able to buy and target video through our platform very, very soon. Look for an announcement in a
few weeks. Clients can already buy mobile ads on smart phones.
What trends are you seeing on the client side today that you weren't seen six months to a year ago?
Clients are beginning to understand that they have new options and capabilities available to them. They are
absolutely fascinated by the opportunity to dynamically message to individuals across digital touchpoints. But at
the same time they are becoming aware that technology like ours exists, they are also becoming frustrated by
three things:



Their IT departments are slowing them down (nothing new here)
Silos in their own organization make execution across touchpoints difficult
Agencies that treat audience targeting as a way to buy cheap media, rather than as a vehicle for
comprehensive customer and prospect contact strategies.
We are just seeing the glimmers now, but I think you will begin to see big changes in online media planning in
2011.
Any thoughts about the recent "What is a DSP?" discussion?
From what I can tell, DSP either refers to one of the agency buying entities, like Cadreon or Vivaki, or it refers to an
exchange buying technology. I hate when we get described as a DSP; we never use the term. While we are the
largest exchange buyer, that is only a small part of what we do. We refer to [x+1] as a multi-touch point audience
investment platform. Since POE quantifies the potential value of every interaction, it allows marketers to
appropriately invest in audiences, not just in bid pricing on an exchange, but in what offer is delivered to each user.
By John Ebbert
March 18, 2010 – 9:38 am
98
Creative Optimization and Providers
New Dapper CEO Beriker On The Direct Response Display
Channel
February 15, 2010 – 9:36 am
James Beriker was named CEO of Dapper, an online advertising
technology company. Beriker's previous roles include CEO at Efficient
Frontier, a search engine marketing firm. See the story.
Beriker discussed Dapper and his experience with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: AdWeek quoted you as saying, "It's [the] beginning days of display is a very powerful
direct response channel." But, display is about generating demand and addressing the top of the funnel,
of course. How does display become a powerful direct response channel similar to search which is more
"bottom of the funnel"?
JB: The same way search does -- by understanding and targeting intent. We have the technology to identify what
consumers are looking for or interested in during that 95% of the time they're not searching. With dynamic display,
we can efficiently and at scale deliver content-driven offers to users that map to their intent.
A year from now, can you share a key milestone which would you like to have seen Dapper accomplish?
Make dynamic display ads as high performing and easy to execute as search is today.
Isn't Dapper an ad network? It would appear to have some of the characteristics such as managing
publisher relationships and advertiser offers?
First and foremost, we're a technology and product company- we use our deep technology assets to build products
that help advertisers more efficiently buy, target, deploy and optimize display advertising campaigns. Dapper has
cracked the code for intelligently serving highly relevant content from an advertisers site into an ad based on a
near real-time understanding of that user's intent and the context of the site the user is on. We work primarily
through the ad exchanges and with our partner DSPs to deliver our customer's dynamic display ads, so I would not
call us an ad network.
By John Ebbert
February 15, 2010 – 9:36 am
99
Eyeblaster Research Shows Audience Buying Habits Says
Geifman
Email This Post
February 3, 2010 – 3:44 pm
Recent Eyeblaster research led by Ariel Gelfman looked at
conversions from more than 10 billion impressions and showed that
their are correlations between online and offline buying habits. Read
the release.
Geifman discussed the research with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: In the release about your eCommerce report
you say, "This research also highlights the unique potential of
addressable advertising in making digital channels even more
effective conversion producers." Can you drill down a bit here?
What is the link you see in the research to audience buying in
digital?
AG: Digital affords the ability to uniquely target users unlike other
channels such as traditional out of home and even TV. The research
points out that online advertising drives high conversions in tandem with spikes in offline retail figures. Audience
buying can become an invaluable tool for advertisers. If advertisers can reach consumers via online display while
in the midst of the buying decision, they can persuade them to buy their product and not the competitor’s. With
addressable advertising becoming more widely adopted by marketers, users experience more relevant advertising
and this is expected to increase online conversions and grow digital display as a direct response medium. The
ability to target the right audience and eliminate wasted impressions will improve ROI and increase user response
online. Ultimately, this will drive sales and activity on E-commerce sites.
Any thoughts as to why your research showed conversions reaching their all time high on the Monday
following Christmas? What might be the consumer's thought process?
Customers have matured, and are not making the online/off-line distinction anymore. Some consumers are still
waiting at the door of the store in early hours of Black Friday, and some are aggressively checking for online
bargains on Cyber Monday. The spike in conversions follows the same shopping patterns seen in the brick and
mortar retailers – a strong response to after-Christmas sales. E-commerce stores are using similar tactics online
as offline stores do to lure consumers. It’s evident that shoppers, especially after Christmas, are programmed to
expect sales and research confirms that consumers consider online on the same playing field as store front
retailers. The same habits occurred on the other notable high volume shopping days such as Cyber Monday and
the last few days leading up to Christmas. Similar patterns also existed on low-volume shopping days such as
Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.
Can you infer an audience here?
Eyeblaster tracks users who have seen one of the ads that was served by Eyeblaster and then went to the retailers
website. Ads appear in myriad of environments, from high-end financial websites through news outlets and
gaming sites. Retailers are already targeting their offers to the right audience on the websites, so if Macy’s is
having a sale on handbags, it would select the appropriate placements for its ads. The point here is that online
display advertising is ubiquitous and can serve any industry and any audience, as long as you pick the right media.
Given the ad creative's (ad banner for example) importance in the targeting/optimization process, how can
technology better tap the minds of the creative in the agency, for example? And visa versa?
100
Some creative directors look at innovations in digital creative and think their jobs have been watered down to multivariate testing.
While there are a lot of variables influencing the performance of ads, such as placement, format, the use of video,
etc., the creative itself is of great importance. While it may seem that with the robust analytics that companies like
Eyeblaster offer, advertising has become a science, it is still very much an art. Nevertheless, creative directors
now have the advantage that they can draw insights on what works and what doesn’t from the data to make better
ads. For example, eMarketer highlighted recent research confirming that rollover initiated video works better than
videos that are initiated by click. Insights like these can be incorporated into creatives to improve online
advertising.
By John Ebbert
February 3, 2010 – 3:44 pm
101
CEO Kartzman Says Spongecell Increasing Engagement,
Interaction In Display Advertising
Email This Post
March 24, 2010 – 9:59 am
Ben Kartzman is CEO of Spongecell, an advertising technology
company.
AdExchanger.com: You have pivoted the company on
occasion to find new opportunity. Can you talk about what you
learned with each pivot and how it informs what you're doing
today?
BK: At Spongecell we have a culture of being agile and iterative whether it's our business model or software development
methodology, we pride ourselves on being ahead of the market
and simultaneously adapting to what clients are buying. It's
common knowledge among entrepreneurs and investors that the
business model you start with will probably not be the business
model you succeed with. Our most recent pivot, to our interactive
advertising product, has been one that we knew we would make as
it had been on our product roadmap since the inception of our
company. As our business grew we kept getting more and more
requests from clients to take our functionality and pull it into display
ads. We finally obliged, and 18 months later due to nice quarter
over quarter growth we have decommissioned our old products and
are now 100% focused on our advertising solution.
What problem is Spongecell solving for display advertising? Is
this a brand or DR solution?
We're actually both. Brands look to us to drive engagement beyond
the click from standard flash banners. DR advertisers look to
Spongecell to drive conversions in-banner. By providing
measurable engagement across a broad set of functionality we believe Spongecell is offering one of the first
Performance Branding solutions at scale. We work with advertisers to implement the best application of our
functionality and build the perfect mix of DR and branding for their campaign.
We hope Spongecell offers a solution to an industry plagued by long production times, heavyweight ads and
meaningless metrics. Advertisers can have Spongecell units built in a couple of days that will run on almost any
placement / publisher and drive interactions that actually mean something to their business. Whether it's having a
user download a coupon, fill out a registration form, watch a video or browse products (all without clicking, by the
way), Spongecell provides meaningful interactions that helps advertisers drive more ROI for their advertising
dollar.
Recently Facebook said they would eliminate standard format display ads in favor of more of an integrated
approach. How does the Spongecell model fit with this move by the social media giant?
Facebook signaled their belief in interaction and engagement over the impression and click, something we couldn't
agree with more. We hope to make available the same social interactive functionality, and more, across every
impression on the internet.
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Who are your clients? (either generally as in ad networks or specifically, naming the clients) How does the
pricing model work?
Anyone advertising online and looking for a proven way to drive engagement is our client. That means agencies,
brands, networks, DSPs, anyone. We're already working with a number of top tier agencies including Universal
McCann, OMD, Initiative. We also consider ad networks and publishers our clients and service them much in the
same way we work with agencies. We typically sell on a CPM, although in some cases we do look at CPE or CPA.
And the competitive set? What do you see as points of differentiation?
Our competitors include companies who are making standard display more effective. We don't see the traditional
rich media players as competitors because we're not a rich media company (our ads are lightweight, don't expand,
and can run on almost any site/any placement). Spongecell's focus is on providing value to consumers and
advertisers within the constraints of non-interruptive units. Our clients cite our array of capabilities including our
focus on social media, our ability to build ads incredibly quickly (in less than a day) and our ability to optimize and
update ads without having to re-traffic when asked why they chose Spongecell.
Is an engagement pricing metric the future for display?
We're definitely believers in it. Engagement pricing has the potential to offer advertisers who can't track
conversions online to adopt a performance model that is more closely aligned to their business than clicks.
In terms of funding, do you anticipate seeking investment in the future?
We're profitable and growing rapidly quarter over quarter so investment isn't a requirement for us right now. That
said, we may be making an announcement in the next few months so stay tuned.
What are your thoughts about attribution models for display these days? Does anything work?
It's important for advertisers to measure the success of their spend using metrics that are aligned with their
business goals. While they have their place in attribution models, we're not big believers in click or view based
attribution. On the other hand, interaction and engagement based attribution addresses their shortcomings; as it
doesn't suffer the cookie overload problems of view and is a much more statistically significant sample than click.
Interaction attribution, especially a strategy that weights interaction types based on their desirability to the brand, is
uniquely positioned to drive metrics that are aligned with a businesses goals.
Publishers are under a lot of pressure these days to drive revenue. Can Spongecell products be seen as
something important for publishers, too?
Some of our best clients are publishers. We help them to deliver unique, cost effective solutions for their
advertisers. In a broader sense, publishers can benefit from our interactive units because they drive attributable
interaction in a user friendly environment that keeps users on-site. We're currently working closely with folks like
IAC to explore these types of Engagement Marketing opportunities.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 24, 2010 – 9:59 am
103
CEO Calvin Lui Plays The Cloud Card With Tumri’s
Marketing Analytics Offering
February 17, 2010 – 3:46 pm
Creative optimization company, Tumri, announced in a release today
what it calls a new cloud-based, "real-time marketing analytics
solution" with the goal of simplifying "campaign launch and reduce
time-to-value for the most common types of dynamic creative
marketing campaigns." Read the release.
AdExchanger discussed the announcement with Tumri CEO Calvin
Lui.
AdExchanger.com: It would seem that Tumri could use these
new tools to create its own demand-side platform. How much longer until you pull the trigger on the Tumri
DSP?
CL: At a high level, Tumri's mission is to provide marketers with a dynamic marketing platform that offers the
following capabilities:



Deeper marketing insights
End-to-end, real-time decisioning
Efficient execution
Today, Tumri is mainly known for our dynamic creative optimization technology. But we've also been asked to, and
have delivered, media buying and optimization services for some of our clients. Media buying and optimization has
not been our core competency, but for certain clients it is critical that we tightly integrate their media and creative
optimization to accomplish their goals. So, we can offer a combined offering if an advertiser wants such an option.
In our view, though, a demand side platform (DSP) is just one of the components of the end-game in "next
generation" display advertising. Current discussions about DSPs revolve mostly around data-driven, real-time
access to media inventory via exchanges and real-time bidding (RTB) environments. In addition to exchange and
RTB executions, however, we believe that the long term solution will continue to need a way to marry analytics and
thought processes across contract media buys, too. Dynamic creative works across all media executions and is a
critical part of the end-game, as well.
The key to delivering maximum value for display advertisers is in providing a platform that can holistically capture,
report and activate against multiple dimensions and vectors of data and performance. Effective activation of this
data requires the ability to select and optimize against media, audience, offer, creative execution and post-click
experience - regardless of where or how the media and audience is sourced. We are working on new solutions
here, as well. Today, we announced the launch of our cloud based, real-time analytics platform named Dynamic
Insight. Dynamic Insight provides an easy-to-use online portal that gives rich, hourly views into the performance of
creative, offers, media, and audiences - regardless of how the media was bought.
We currently work with several providers of media optimization solutions, many of which are DSPs like MediaMath,
Turn, x+1, and others. We also can work with various landing page optimization providers. Over time, Tumri may
also need (or be asked) to provide offerings in each of these categories. We aren't really sure how all this plays
out, frankly, so we have architected our Dynamic Marketing platform to let marketers choose the specific point
solutions that they feel works best for them. Right now, we are prepared to offer partner solutions as well as offer a
fully integrated solution, depending upon our client's needs.
104
How important is real-time or near real-time reporting to effective creative optimization? Are Tumri and its
clients at the mercy of others such as data providers and proprietary in-house tracking systems, for
example? Getting real-time feedback from offline, in-store purchases is next to impossible is it not?
Real time reporting is critical to creative optimization in a large number of campaigns today, and we believe it will
become even more critical in the future. Effective marketing today is no longer about one-time burst campaigns
revolving around singular events. Moving forward, effective marketing will be more and more about engaging in a
real time dialogue with consumers, on an ongoing basis. These conversations must always be aware of who the
conversation is with, where the conversation occurs, why it is occuring, and what is being said and has been said
(by both parties). Doing this will eventually require real-time data analysis, optimization and reporting across the
board. And this real-time reporting is not just needed for creative optimization, but also for media and audience
optimization. Prices, stories, news change constantly - this impacts what catches the attention of consumers. We
believe that we are at the very beginning of a "next generation" of marketing, where all pieces will need work in
concert with each other in real time: data providers, media sources, and tracking and attribution systems.
In our view, a platform that can measure, report and act dynamically upon multiple dimensions of data in real time
will be a prerequisite to future marketing improvements and enhancements. But this is not just "future talk" - there
are real marketers taking advantage of these capabilities today. We have worked with major brands such as HP,
Nike, Sears, Travelocity and more and have seen very significant, tangible business results.
Regarding in-store purchases: real-time feedback from offline, in-store purchases is a real challenge at this point.
However, there are proxies that we can work with. Over time, these systems and executions will become more
integrated and more possible.
Looking at agencies, the media side is comfortable with these new automated creative tools. But the
creative side is wary. Have you considered how you get creative agencies and creatives to leverage and
champion your technology?
Yes, we've seen some caution from creative shops - until they understand that we aren't so much trying to
automate the creative process but instead are automating the busy work of managing content as well as testing
and optimizing complex campaigns. That, and making whole new types of personalized marketing even possible.
To be clear, Tumri does NOT replace the creative process. The "magic" of developing the right message, image
and copy to inspire consumers is the work of very talented creative agencies and designers, and we would be
foolish to think we could replicate this part of the business. We are technologists. We provide a platform that
makes it possible to cost-effectively implement one-to-one marketing at the scale of display, using our clients
creative designs and assets to drive every campaign.
To help further streamline this new "dynamic" creative process, we continue to roll out new tools - not templates,
but instead useful design tools in familiar environments - that enable creative agencies to work seamlessly in their
own creative environments and then upload their work into our platform with little effort. The goal is to make their
work efficient and effective without constraining their creative juices.
A lot of the solution in overcoming resistance to dynamic creative optimization is simply to continue to meet our
client's needs and those of their creative shops as well. We are actively working on new solutions here. For
example, our AdPod Heat Map report shows creative designers the exact parts of the ad that generated an
enagagement, a click or a conversion. We have more tools in the works, so stay tuned.
By John Ebbert
February 17, 2010 – 3:46 pm
105
Data and Measurement
Aggregate Knowledge Adopts New, BlueKai Server-ToServer Technology For More Efficient Data Management
Says VP Bensoussan
April 20, 2010 – 10:24 am
Aggregate Knowledge announced that it has adopted "BlueKai's
new server-to-server data transfer technology, which greatly
increases the efficiencies in which BlueKai data is transferred and
delivered for ad campaign targeting and optimization within the AK
Discovery Platform." Read more.
Pascal Bensoussan, VP of Products at Aggregate Knowledge, an
audience management and real-time ad optimization platform,
discussed the new alliance and what it means.
AdExchanger.com: How does "server-to-server data transfer
technology" work? Can you compare it to the previous way
you were working with BlueKai and show the key
differentiators?
PB: The prevalent method for cookie pooling is based on using an image pixel, placed on a web page, to transfer
user data. Pixel capacity limitations (i.e., typically no more than 4 pixels per page) and the inherent time required
to “see” qualifying users via their browser result in slow cookie ramp time for advertising campaigns. Typically a
campaign takes 2-4 weeks to ramp up the cookie pool, reaching the most efficient run rate at the end of the
campaign.
With server-to-server data transfer, Aggregate Knowledge and BlueKai have created a common ID space allowing
BlueKai to transfer qualifying user IDs very quickly once a new campaign is created in the BlueKai user interface.
The results: More data and more users, faster. Greater privacy controls. More time to test and optimize media
buys and creative designs.
Can you quantify the performance improvement that advertisers will see from this type of integration? Or
maybe the improvements in potential scale of the campaign?
This type of integration provides an efficient mechanism to scale cookie pools in a matter of days instead of weeks,
allowing more time for media channels to deliver those users. Reach improvements can be significant. Our initial
tests suggest that campaigns can reach 2-3X the number of unique users using server-to-server data transfer.
The technology is still relatively new and rapidly evolving. At this early stage, we have only scraped the surface of
what can be done. Other benefits include (1) audience management scalability and flexibility, (2) faster ramp on
biddable inventory, (3) shorter learning, leaving more time for optimized bidding and dynamic ad serving.
Can you see server-to-server technology integration becoming a standard if not a requirement for many
data providers?
Server-to-server integration will definitely become the dominant solution to buy more data, faster, and more
securely.
106
Our work with BlueKai is very much a step forward. That been said, a few hurdles are in the way of broader
adoption:
1. Very few data providers have the technology to support server-to-server integration
2. Advertisers not willing to “spend all their data budget in a matter of days
3. Few companies have the infrastructure to make this economically worthwhile (i.e. scaling volume faster
than operations costs)
By John Ebbert
April 20, 2010 – 10:24 am
107
Aggregate Knowledge CEO Paul Martino On Big Data,
DSPs and New Funds
January 6, 2010 – 2:59 pm
Aggregate Knowledge announced today that it raised $9 million
in a round led by OVP Venture Partners and with additional
participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, DAG
Ventures, and its original existing angels. See the release.
AdExchanger.com asked Martino about Aggregate Knowledge
business and the funding environment for ad technology today.
AdExchanger.com: In the release on your new round of
funding, "harnessing big data" is discussed. What is "big
data"? And what might a typical client look like with "big
data"?
PM: Big data means the ability to efficiently process tens of thousands of data transactions per second (DTPS)
from advertiser site traffic (e.g. page views, clicks, purchases, any custom action), 3rd party data from data
networks and data exchanges, and campaign data (e.g. impressions, clicks).
AdExchanger.com: Given your Aggregate Knowledge Discovery Platform, where does AK fit in the
demand-side platform world? Are you a competitor, a partner, etc. to DSPs like MediaMath, CPM Advisors,
[x+1], AppNexus, Invite Media, Turn, Adbuyer.com, etc.?
PM: We consider DSP platforms as partners because we do not handle media buying. We allow agencies to
centralize the management of their audience data and segments and then distribute those targetable audience
segments to not only DSPs, but also real-time bidders, dynamic creative vendors (including AK), and analytics
platforms (including AK).
AdExchanger.com: What's the funding climate like these days for ad tech companies?
PM: There is definitely more activity, but VCs are a lot more rigorous in their due diligence. Getting really
competitive term sheets really depends on the management team, the existing customer base, the product vision,
and the technology.
By John Ebbert
January 6, 2010 – 2:59 pm
108
Aggregate Knowledge Adopts New, BlueKai Server-ToServer Technology For More Efficient Data Management
Says VP Bensoussan
April 20, 2010 – 10:24 am
Aggregate Knowledge announced that it has adopted "BlueKai's
new server-to-server data transfer technology, which greatly
increases the efficiencies in which BlueKai data is transferred and
delivered for ad campaign targeting and optimization within the AK
Discovery Platform." Read more.
Pascal Bensoussan, VP of Products at Aggregate Knowledge, an
audience management and real-time ad optimization platform,
discussed the new alliance and what it means.
AdExchanger.com: How does "server-to-server data transfer
technology" work? Can you compare it to the previous way
you were working with BlueKai and show the key
differentiators?
PB: The prevalent method for cookie pooling is based on using an image pixel, placed on a web page, to transfer
user data. Pixel capacity limitations (i.e., typically no more than 4 pixels per page) and the inherent time required
to “see” qualifying users via their browser result in slow cookie ramp time for advertising campaigns. Typically a
campaign takes 2-4 weeks to ramp up the cookie pool, reaching the most efficient run rate at the end of the
campaign.
With server-to-server data transfer, Aggregate Knowledge and BlueKai have created a common ID space allowing
BlueKai to transfer qualifying user IDs very quickly once a new campaign is created in the BlueKai user interface.
The results: More data and more users, faster. Greater privacy controls. More time to test and optimize media
buys and creative designs.
Can you quantify the performance improvement that advertisers will see from this type of integration? Or
maybe the improvements in potential scale of the campaign?
This type of integration provides an efficient mechanism to scale cookie pools in a matter of days instead of weeks,
allowing more time for media channels to deliver those users. Reach improvements can be significant. Our initial
tests suggest that campaigns can reach 2-3X the number of unique users using server-to-server data transfer.
The technology is still relatively new and rapidly evolving. At this early stage, we have only scraped the surface of
what can be done. Other benefits include (1) audience management scalability and flexibility, (2) faster ramp on
biddable inventory, (3) shorter learning, leaving more time for optimized bidding and dynamic ad serving.
Can you see server-to-server technology integration becoming a standard if not a requirement for many
data providers?
Server-to-server integration will definitely become the dominant solution to buy more data, faster, and more
securely.
Our work with BlueKai is very much a step forward. That been said, a few hurdles are in the way of broader
adoption:
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1. Very few data providers have the technology to support server-to-server integration
2. Advertisers not willing to “spend all their data budget in a matter of days
3. Few companies have the infrastructure to make this economically worthwhile (i.e. scaling volume faster
than operations costs)
By John Ebbert
April 20, 2010 – 10:24 am
110
aWhere Location Solutions Offer Digital Marketers In-Store
Sales Insights Says CEO Corbett
April 9, 2010 – 9:39 am
John D. Corbett, PhD is Co-Founder, President & Chief Executive
Officer of aWhere, which provides an analytics platform focused on
location intelligence.
AdExchanger.com: Please give us a bit of history about
aWhere. A new company? Or pivoting for new opportunity?
aWhere is a ten year old company that has historically focused on the agribusiness and world health markets. The
business was constructed on robust geographic information system (GIS) technology, providing the means to
integrate a variety of causal data elements with geographic location intelligence. The growth of mapping tools and
information sources has made these tools even more valuable over the company’s growth.
What problem is aWhere solving today?
The general set of solutions are focused on enabling more informed business decisions by integrating disparate
data sources and applying analytic tools clearly point to what causal factors will drive growth. A good illustration of
this is using trading area methods to append shopper demographics to retail stores, then matching the shopper
demographic profile to heavy consumption profiles for consumer products. This directs the intelligent assortment of
items for individual retail stores.
What differentiates aWhere's geo-data from others in the space such as ESRI, MapInfo, Clairtas and
Spectra?
aWhere is focused on analyzing product items at store level, and has methods uniquely designed to process that
volume of data. Other providers like ESRI or MapInfo provide general use software and mapping tools, but do not
have the analytic models designed for specific vertical industries. Claritas and Spectra offering similar methods,
but are typically not working the volume of product by store level detail that aWhere is designed for application.
Why did aWhere move into packaged goods?
The CPG market has the need for very detailed product by store analysis, and has the broad availability of
information sources to feed the tools. This vertical space is a very mature industry with extensive retailer and
distributor business models build on the release and analysis of product by store detail. Importantly, the industry is
able to execute business analysis and implement store level recommendations, making it very attractive for
application of the aWhere tools.
How and why are retailers making in-store sales data freely available?
Several major retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, CVS, and Whole Foods have well established business models
built on release of item by store level sales detail to the manufacturer communities. Most other major retailers in
the CPG space have some form of detail data release established either on a more selective release basis, such
as to the leading manufacturers in each category, or periodic release, such as to feed an analytic process that they
want the manufacturer to perform, already in place.
Discuss the pain points for aWhere's clients today.
The shortest path to value for the aWhere offering is store or store cluster level product assortment solutions. As
the methods for matching the product item consumer profile to the store shopper profile provides a clear and
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actionable business recommendation, clients find this to be a quick return on their investment. The ability to aid
clients in building a broader distribution base is measurable and quantifiable.
How has Point-of-Sale data evolved over the past few years? And, what kind of scale are we talking about
here in terms of data processing today?
This trend has accelerated over the last five years. As processing power and data storage costs have fallen, the
ability for retailers to store and manage item level detail has created the availability of this information. A typical
retail grocery store will stock 40K items and will hold daily detail on the transaction volume across their stores. So,
for a large grocery chain it would be common to find a thousand stores with 40K items in each store and have
them processing and storing daily transactions.
How could a digital marketer make aWhere data work for them?
Any marketer who is attempting to measure the impact of on-line ads or promotions in off-line sales volume can
find value in the aWhere offering. The means to geographically target campaign weight, then measure the precise
impact on off-line transactions creates the path to measure ad impact. As the transaction volume can be tracked at
item, store, day level, any geographically targeted campaign can be measured with high precision.
What about couponing and other parts of the marketing mix? How is a marketer going to achieve proper
attribution?
A standard approach to this is to hold other variables constant by having the same program offering operating in
the test and control ad markets. This is typically easy to do as most trade and coupon programs are running in very
broad geographies, and thus allow the client to overlay the test ad schedule over existing marketing plans.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 9, 2010 – 9:39 am
112
CEO Glass On New Self-Service Media Buying Tool From
Bizo
April 21, 2010 – 4:05 pm
Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo, discussed the b2b targeting data platform's new selfservice media application to debut later this quarter, MyAds. Read more on the Bizo
blog.
AdExchanger.com: What keyed your interest in offering a self-serve media
business that leverages Bizo data?
RG: It's all about getting our capabilities into the hands of businesses that might not have the budget to spend
$10,000 per month. With our self service tool, a marketer can target their business audience for as little as $5.00
per day.
Where will you find inventory sources for the self-serve model? Also, will you offer features like frequency
capping, for example?
At first, all of the inventory will be our same managed publications that we work with for our premium advertisers.
We will not be offering frequency capping to start, but it's likely that it will be part of the feature set we'll offer down
the road. We plan to listen to customer needs and build features that they ask us for.
Doesn't this cannibalize business with your partners who are selling Bizo data?
We don't think that there is any cannibalization with this product because there isn't anybody who offers our data in
a self-service capacity for the small marketer. One of the reasons we are looking to bring this to market is because
there isn't any other solution for the small business to reach a targeted business audience.
Any plans to offer a full-service media business?
No, we are a data provider at our core. We don't plan to get into production or creative.
By John Ebbert
April 21, 2010 – 4:05 pm
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Bizo Partners With Ad Network Martini Media, Finds B2B
Fit With B2C
February 25, 2010 – 9:06 am
B2B ad targeting data company, Bizo, announced a partnership with online ad
network Martini Media, which targets high net worth consumers. Bizo will provide its
B2B data segments to the ad network. Read the release.
Bizo CEO Russell Glass discussed the new Martini Media partnership and its
implications with AdExchanger.com.
Martini Media would appear to be a B2C opportunity for Bizo. Are you expanding beyond B2B?
RG: We've received a lot of interest from marketers coming to us asking if our executive and c-suite categories
could be used as proxies for high net worth. After a few of these tests went well, we saw an opportunity to leverage
our data in a new way. I would call it "prosumer" targeting - or reaching a business executive when they're
pursuing interests outside of work. Martini is one of the leaders in this category, so there was a natural fit to be
working together.
As you re-sell the same cookies to different clients, are you getting any feedback regarding the rising cost
of media as, potentially, different advertisers target the same user? Or is there so much inventory out
there, advertisers don't have to worry about rising costs?
We're not seeing an increase in media costs based on the inventory - it's more based on the audience and the
limited number of impressions where you can find the audience. As more advertisers look to get in front of the
same audience, the value of the impressions those audience members can be found on are going up.
How is business breaking out between ad network sales and direct advertisers? Any trends you can
report?
Our business is 60% direct sales and 40% indirect where partners like Martini and others use our data to better
target B2B audiences. We expect the indirect component of our business will outpace direct sales as we grow.
By John Ebbert
February 25, 2010 – 9:06 am
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CEO Tawakol Discusses BlueKai Pulse Index And Intender
Signal Strength
March 29, 2010 – 5:31 pm
BlueKai released its latest Pulse Index with particular focus around
car buyers and insights such as "the appearance of Kia and
Hyundai in the Top 20 Car Models may indicate a shift in intent
towards more 'value' -focused brands. ". Download the Pulse Index
(PDF). And, read the release.
BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol discussed the Pulse report and its
findings with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: Auto in-market intent data appears particularly powerful, how does it differ from other
verticals?
OT: In-market data is all about acquiring the strongest signals of intent from the user and the strength of a
particular signal is often related to how consumers make purchases in a given vertical. At BlueKai we modify our
"in-market" criteria to reflect this changing behavior from vertical to vertical. For example, for travel, a typical
consumer considers a few factors before purchase: price, schedule, and destination. Collection of any one of those
factors is a very high-quality signal. In autos, the factors are similarly distinct - price range, type of car, new or
used. The fewer the factors involved in the decision making the stronger the signal from any one of those deciding
factors. For other verticals the "decision factors" change. For example, in shopping, we move to the product level,
i.e. looking at a specific flat panel tv defines an in-market event for consumer electronics. We are very deliberate in
adjusting our filters to accommodate the different consumer decision processes across verticals.
How can publishers unlock the value of the intent of their users?
BlueKai is keenly interested in encouraging a vibrant, healthy data ecosystem. As a result, we would advise that
"unlocking the value of intent" for publishers begins with treating that information and data carefully with full privacy
controls and transparency for the user. No ecosystem is going to develop if consumers are concerned about "bad
actors" misusing their data regardless if its non-PII. Publishers should maintain clean, clear guidelines for their user
data and work with established and respected companies that follow those same guidelines.
Assuming the above is understood, publishers can then look to establish the value of their users in a spot market
like that of the BlueKai Exchange. Once publishers understand the inherent value of their data they can begin
building product strategies around optimization.
What's the case being made for brand marketers with the Pulse Index?
Historically, targeting audience on the internet has always been of interest to brand marketers, but practically never
offered the type of reach they were looking for. Pulse shows brand marketers that obtaining reach for targeted
high-value segments is now possible through a data exchange. Pulse also provides interesting feedback on the
effectiveness of traditional marketing on consumer intent, as we have seen increases in intent for specific brands
shortly after the launch of high-profile national campaigns.
By John Ebbert
March 29, 2010 – 5:31 pm
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BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol Discusses Recent Investment
And Plans
February 1, 2010 – 4:03 pm
Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai, discussed today's
announcement regarding a new $21 million round
of funding (Read the release.) with
AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: Obviously, this is a big
round. What plans can you share regarding
future areas of investment at BlueKai and where
this round will be funneled?
OT: One area in particular will get a lot more focus:
Our partners currently use our interface to schedule
data campaigns. To make it easier to embed
BlueKai data everywhere, we will be releasing APIs,
server-to-server capabilities, real time bidder
support and other technologies. We have been
impressed with the demand for data that our
channel has displayed, so we are committed to
support them. This will be particularly useful for
networks, DSPs (demand-side platforms) and
trading desks.
What's the funding climate like these days? Was there any particular strategy to finding the right
partner(s)?
The funding climate is definitely good. For us the right partner had to have two main attributes:
1. You want to work with the partners - because they will collaborate with you for years to come.
2. They get your business and are excited about its fundamentals.
Is the data exchange model ready to go beyond U.S. borders? Any thoughts regarding international
expansion?
Yes, the data exchange model is ready for expansion beyond the US. I can't give a timeline, but it is definitely
something of interest to BlueKai.
By John Ebbert
February 1, 2010 – 4:03 pm
116
Digital Element On Postcode Targeting And U.S. And
Europe Tech Targeting Interest
February 16, 2010 – 1:14 pm
In a release yesterday, Digital Element announced that it would begin
offering postcode-level ("zip code" in the U.S.) targeting capabilities. (See
the release.)
Digital Element's Vice President Frank Bobo discussed the implication of
European expansion and the market for IP targeting.
AdExchanger.com: Can you help us with the jargon? What does the
phrase "postcode-level database" mean? And then, how is this different than other solutions?
FB: Postcode-level targeting is akin to zip code-level targeting in the United States. (In the United Kingdom, there
are no zip codes, only post/postal codes). There have always been inherent limitations in tying zip/postcode-level
information to IP addresses due to the way the Internet is architected, as well as the way IP
Intelligence/geolocation information is derived. Digital Element creates a "map" of Internet topology: the way the
Internet is routed, where end-point networking equipment is located, etc. As such, we can tie an IP address to an
endpoint piece of network equipment, for example a DSLAM (a Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer that
allows telephone lines to make faster connections to the Internet. And, with great confidence we can now identify
the country, state, and city where that IP address resides. However, that one piece of networking equipment may
serve a 25- to 30-mile radius, which might include several zip/postcodes, making it hard to tie a 5-digit zip code to
that specific IP address.
What is new and differentiating with NetAcuity Edge is that no other provider has been able to circumvent these
limitations in either the United States or abroad. Because of Digital Element's patented routing infrastructure
analysis and the insight we glean from a network of global commercial partners, we are, for the first time, able to
offer a highly accurate dataset of IP address-to-postcode data that complies with the highest standards of end-user
privacy and anonymity. So now, online marketers, advertisers, publishers, e-tailers, etc. are able to further
segment and target their online audiences at a "hyper-local" level (targeting online to a postal-code level) based on
IP addresses-which brings more reach and relevance to online endeavors.
Can you address Digital Element's traction in the UK and Europe?
We have been delivering IP Intelligence/geolocation information since 1999 and have seen year-over-year
exponential growth in the adoption of IP Intelligence, both at home and abroad. For the online advertising spacewhich was the first segment to leverage and monetize IP Intelligence data-geotargeting has become table stakes.
In the United States, the technology continues to grow in areas such as social networking, online video/music, ecommerce, and more. As far as Europe, which has been a key area of focus, we have seen enormous growth
during the past few years, mainly in advertising, online video/music and new media.
What are key differences that you see between the European and U.S. markets for Digital Element -or
Digital Envoy, DI's parent, as a whole?
In terms of adoption, the United States has been ahead of the curve, but Europe is "waking up" to the idea and
deploying more and more of our technology. In some ways, location is of more importance in Europe, where
countries are close together and online marketers have more of a challenge addressing the cultural, language and
branding differences between regions. Because our data and technology applications are global, there isn't really a
difference per se between the two markets in terms of how our technology can be leveraged. Any differences
seem to have been historically centered on speed of adoption and understanding the value of our technology.
However, that is a gap that is quickly closing.
By John Ebbert
February 16, 2010 – 1:14 pm
117
eXelate Announces Invite Media Partnership; CEO Zohar
Offers Insights On Data Marketplace
January 26, 2010 – 9:05 am
Online targeting data provider, eXelate, and Invite Media, a demand-side platform,
announced an agreement in which "Invite Media customers gain both seamless
access to eXelate data across multiple media exchanges including Right Media,
Google DoubleClick's Ad Exchange, AdBrite, AppNexus, AdMeld, PubMatic and
others, as well as dynamic insight reporting indicating the audience characteristics
that are driving results." Read the release.
Meir Zohar, Chief Executive Officer of eXelate, spoke to AdExchanger.com about
details of the release and the application of data in online advertising today.
AdExchanger.com: What do you mean by "multipoint performance analytics?"
MZ: Basically this process is all about providing advertisers with a new way to define who their audience is, and
what members of that or any newly discovered audience segment are truly performing. It is based on “machine
learning” in which each distributed creative looks at all potential segment identifiers, seeing which creates a lift,
reporting that and then allowing impressions to be moved to the high performers. We have coined the term
“behavioral optimization” for the process – and it is something I think you will hear a great deal more about in 2010
and beyond.
AdExchanger.com: Can you discuss the complexity of using eXelate data today? Do advertisers and
agencies need to be adept with demand-side platforms, for example?
MZ: A key differentiator of eXelate’s approach to the buy side of the market is our “open platform” position. Our
philosophy is that data should be able to be applied in many different methods, delivered in multiple formats and
priced by flexible business models. Targeting applications for branding campaigns demand a different business
and technology model than media exchange based analytics reporting or campaign optimization does. It is not a
one size fits all data world. Our technology supports this concept by offering an open API that’s very easy to
integrate into various demand side platforms, a direct data buy interface and a flexible group of business models.
In a nutshell, we want to make our partners’ data easily applied anywhere so they can find their audience
everywhere!
AdExchanger.com: What do you see as key drivers to demand for display advertising by
advertisers/agencies in 2010?
MZ: A few thoughts on what will drive the display business:
1. General economic recovery (a rising tide . . .)
2. Remaining scars from the last downturn (dollars shifting from inefficient offline to accountable online
media)
3. Further development of the “secondary channel” based on Real-Time Bidding (RTB) becoming fully
operationalized which will drive the continued growth of ad exchanges. That will go side-by-side with the
growth in quality and quantity of data that feeds second channel targeting.
4. Growth of premium media channel based on (a) the opportunity for the agencies to start leveraging data
from companies like eXelate to perform “audience buying” as opposed to strictly using content as proxy for
audience (this will eventually move offline as well), and (b) explosion of the agency buying platforms such
as Vivaki, Cadreon and MIG, who want premium environments, but can drive massive centralized volume
(and targeting as noted above)
5. Great data that will fuel display performance which will finally start to approach that of search!
January 26, 2010 – 9:05 am
118
eXelate’s Zagorski Discusses Nielsen PRIZM Offline Data
Integration, Looks At Impact
March 15, 2010 – 4:43 pm
eXelate announced a new partnership with Nielsen which will
enable its PRIZM (and P$YCLE and ConneXions) offline
segmentation through eXelate's online data exchange for digital
marketers. Read the release.
eXelate's CRO Mark Zagorski discussed the impact of offline data
in the online world and its integration into eXelate's data exchange
business model.
AdExchanger.com: What makes offline data so powerful
online?
MZ: I think the power in offline data is in its ability to translate commonly used targeting attributes to a new
medium. As an industry, we have always been trying to force advertisers to use a new lexicon to understand how
they would reach a specific audience and in what manner they should define success. Offline data enables
marketers to use the same targeting criteria that they have been using for a broadcast buy in an online world -basically allowing us to push online buys "up the funnel" out of DR and into the branding world.
How does using Nielsen's PRIZM and eXelate work for brand marketers? Can you take us through a
scenario?
Brand marketers will have the ability to target consumers online who fit into one of PRIZM's 66 lifestyle clusters -the same type of characteristics that they have been using to direct their offline buys. For example, let's say that a
marketer was looking to reach a target audience of young families who may be interested to promote the upcoming
launch of a new mini-van model. They could target PRIZM cluster 18 (Kids & Cul-de-Sacs) to get a group of
potential buyers at the top of the purchasing funnel rather than have to build an audience of prospects based on
context and other factors which are fuzzy. If they wanted to move down the funnel to drive transaction, the
marketer could look at applying other filters such as in-market auto purchase activity to move past awareness and
into lead generation. The solution really helps move online ad targeting out of the purely transactional mode and
into the brand building zone.
In terms of personally identifiable information (PII), how do you manage PII when offline data is involved?
Privacy is of utmost importance to both companies, which is why eXelate clearly allows for consumer opt-out from
any targeting as well as engage and support groups such as the NAI. Additionally, neither eXelate nor Nielsen
have access to any PII data in the process that we have set up in which no individually identifiable information is
included in the cookie that is delivered to the user. Only the general PRIZM cluster that they belong to is ever
delivered by Nielsen and identified by eXelate in its targeting cookie.
Do you think attribution models are in place that effectively show online campaign's effect offline - as in instore? This would appear to be a critical element for using PRIZM segments through eXelate, correct?
I think that there is still work to be done on that front, and the impact of really solid attribution for online branding
efforts in the offline transactional world will go far beyond this relationship. I believe a great deal of online
advertising's value has focused on the "click" and "conversion" and its power to create awareness has been
grossly under-represented. That however, won't be the first step in evaluating campaign success in the case of
using this type of targeting. What will be an evaluator, will be seeing how leveraging PRIZM data online
performance compares to the proxy of contextual targeting (in all of its forms) which has been used to date to
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reach specific audience groups. If advertisers find that they can take data (which is transportable) and apply to
different types of media (that may not fit the classic audience context they were targeting) at a much more efficient
rate, we have nailed it. At the end of the day, what I hope relationships like this do is start to get online media a
seat at the same table as the offline media when it comes to building brand.
By John Ebbert
March 15, 2010 – 4:43 pm
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CEO Jain Says JovianDATA Enabling Insights On Data For
Ad Networks, Agencies, Advertisers And Publishers
Email This Post
January 19, 2010 – 7:47 am
Parveen Jain is CEO of data technology company, JovianDATA.
AdExchanger.com: On your site, you say: "The more
dimensions, data sources, and KPIS - the better." How can that
possibly be true? Agencies, for example, are sitting on
mountains of data. Are you suggesting they need to harness all
of it.
PJ: JovianDATA technology creates multi-dimensional models with
10’s of dimensions and 10’s of measures (key performance
indicators) on massive amounts of data (100’s of Terabytes) which
processes multi-dimensional queries in seconds. As a result we can
run expeditious and accurate analytics to any level of granularity
without sampling the data with the lowest total cost of ownership
(TCO). This allows us to invite our customers to send us “more data
with more dimensions, data sources and KPI’s”, something that no
other vendor can claim.
We know that once customers have to sample or aggregate the data, they lose the granular nuances that are
critical to identifying and acting upon opportunities in the data, and thus prevent them from maximizing the return
on their advertising spending. JovianDATA has removed this barrier, and our customers discover insights that
allow them to take in-flight actions to optimize their campaigns, during the campaign.
Analyzing data at its lowest granularity allows advertisers to discover large segments or phenomena that might get
lost when data is aggregated to higher dimensions. Analyzing data across more and more dimensions helps us
expose the correlations between various dimensions.
How is JovianDATA differentiating itself from other data providers?
JovianDATA is bringing a game changing technology to handle large data across the entire analytics stack at a
very low cost. Analytics is exposed to end users in the form of applications that provide responses to their business
questions.
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Applications (solutions), and not just a platform or tools like other vendors. We have built
‘Campaign Effectiveness’ and ‘Media-mix Optimization’ applications to help marketers
answer the business questions essential to running their campaigns most effectively.
End-to-end solution. We take away the needs for CapEx and an army of engineers to
assemble, manage and run a multi-vendor analytics stack. We offer the solutions
through SaaS offering that gets a customer in production in weeks, compared to multiple
quarters that it takes with the alternate solutions.
Unprecedented low TCO through dynamic cloud provisioning and an integrated SaaS
model. The dynamic cloud provisioning is one of JovianDATA’s disruptive innovations,
as it gives us 70% to 90% cost savings versus conventional technology stacks.
Ability to handle massive data volumes (e.g., tens to hundreds of terabytes of data). We
thrive on massive data sets as it allows us to extract actionable insights for our
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customers, which is not possible when you sample data. Our customers (Advertisers,
Agencies, Ad Networks and Publishers) now have the ability to answer questions about
their business, campaigns and customers that either technology or economics prevented
them from asking in the past. This is allowing them to optimize their campaign
performance and media mix allocation.
An integrated ETL layer that allows us to align, normalize and cleanse disparate data
sources. JovianDATA also provides data enrichment capabilities that allow customers to
create advanced data models for segmentation and attribution, and advanced measures
such as unduplicated reach, frequency, recency, ad sequencing and n-tiling.
Integrated multi-dimensional analytics that can handle any number of dimensions, data
sources, measures, and key performance indicators. We’ve patent-pending technologies
that allow us to use MDX (multi-dimensional modeling) on 100’s of terabytes of data.
Historically seen as an SQL problem – which needs to pre-aggregate data and pre-build
specific indices – this can now be answered using a spreadsheet-like MDX environment.
For some complex business questions – like understanding the ad survivor rate for a
video ad across multiple video ads on a second-by-second basis – we have taken what
would have required 36 hours in SQL and reduced it to less than 5 minutes in MDX.
Very fast query response time. Most of JovianDATA’s queries, across terabytes of data,
come back in 5 seconds or less. We do not have to pre-build specific indexes based
upon the types of questions that users want to ask. Users can ask completely ad hoc
questions and get the same level of query response. This level of performance lead one
of our customers to call it “analytics at the speed of thought”. To them, this meant they
could have an interactive question-and-answer dialogue with their data.
How do you view offline data? Can it provide huge performance benefits for online advertising and are you
selling (or re-selling) offline data today to marketers?
JovianDATA can handle data from any number of sources, representing on-line or off-line activities. We believe
that offline data is important, especially demographic profile data and sales data, to completing the full view of the
customer engagement funnel. At the same time, we believe on-line campaigns can provide insights that could be
important to planning and tuning the overall advertising spend, including the offline spend. Whether it is offline
media spend for TV, radio or print advertising, or the offline sales data, you need to have the data that represents
the breadth and depth of the customer engagement process. This is critical whether you are focused on lead
acquisition, conquest effectiveness, customer retention or customer maturation.
What are you seeing in the demand-side platform space today? Still early? Are they using data to its fullest
potential?
We believe the limitations in data analytics in terms of accuracy, granularity, timeliness and cost will remain serious
obstacles in providing effective advertising solutions. Statistical models based on sampling and/or curve fitting will
peak out in their abilities to deliver actionable analytics. As the marketers demand more-and-more accountability
and addressability, vendors like JovianDATA with business rules driven and action oriented solutions built on
game-changing analytical platforms will be the only ones to fulfill those requirements.
How does the online publisher work with JovianDATA?
JovianDATA is engaging with several customers today. We have a very simple, three-step process for engaging
with our customers:
1. Give JovianDATA access to your marketing data. That includes data from the full
customer funnel including impressions (from your ad server), clicks (from your web site
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analytics) and conversions (from your point-of-sale system). The data can either be
ftp’ed to us, or give us your user name and password and we’ll pull the data directly from
your ad server or web analytics provider.
2. Help us understand the business questions that you are trying to answer. This allows
JovianDATA to model the data in the most user-efficient structure, and to build some
initial analytics (guided analysis) to answer those questions.
3. Get insights. When we provide access to the customer’s data, we bundle our Campaign
Effectiveness application so that the customer has a complete solution on day one.
Today we can get customers from Step 1 to Step 3 in 4 to 8 weeks, depending upon the complexity of the
business questions. And as we build out our library of data enrichment models and analytics, we expect that
timeline to shrink to 2 to 4 weeks.
What is your specialty in terms of data sets? Auto intenders, for example?
JovianDATA has direct experience in dealing with all sorts of different data. We’ve been working with Ad Networks,
Agencies and Publishers and all of their respective data sources. At this point in our development, we really don’t
have a specific area of industry focus.
How does your pricing model work?
We price based upon the total volume of transactions (total of impressions, clicks, engagements and conversion
transactions) that you want to keep for analysis purposes. Some customers want only 3 months of data, while
others want a full year. For a 3 – 5 billion transactions, that cost would be in the $10k to $20k monthly cost range.
Do you see benefit from data exchanges currently and/or in the future?
Since we do not actually own the data - the data still belongs to our customers – we do not sell through data
exchanges. But on the topic of data exchanges, we are a big fan. Anything that can bring more data into the digital
marketing intelligence processes, the better. As we mentioned above, we want as much breadth and depth in the
data as possible to tease out audience behavioral insights and optimize campaign performance.
What role do you think search retargeting data will play in shaping the data landscape in 2010?
Search retargeting adds a layer of relevancy to banners served to searchers after they leave your client's site. By
recognizing a user's initial need based on the search keyword used, the value of a search listing should increase
by enhanced likelihood of a conversion.
We believe search retargeting data is valuable for increasing the efficiency of display advertising. The interplay
between display and search is one of the most complex problems in analytics. In our work with agencies, they
have had broad goals of coordinating search and display campaigns but so far they have not had an analytics
solution which exploits the interrelationships between search and display. Our Media-mix Optimization application
has changed that. In this application, we analyze data at a per-user granularity to compute the lift in a display
campaign from prior paid search clicks. This enables Advertisers and Agencies to co-ordinate their search and
display campaigns to retarget visitors who have shown search click propensity.
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January 19, 2010 – 7:47 am
123
Kantar Media’s SVP Swallen Discusses New Ad Network
Stats Capabilities
April 28, 2010 – 6:00 pm
WPP Group's Kantar Media announced that it introducing Internet
ad network competitive tracking reporting. This data is the first by a
research provider to offer detailed insight into the companies,
advertisers and products running on ad networks." Read more on
Research Magazine.
Research SVP Jon Swallen of Kantar Media North America
discussed the new product.
AdExchanger.com: Why offer this service? What problem is Kantar Media responding to?
JS: Ad networks have become a major channel for Internet display advertising. To date, measurement has lagged
behind. Our clients need competitive and strategic intelligence on network activity to support a wide-range of
decision making. That’s the hole we are trying to fill.
For example, site owners and media companies will be able to use these data to evaluate networks’ share of
business across product categories and advertisers and develop targeted prospect lists. Agencies and advertisers
will gain insights into the strategies of their competitors and be able to identify site overlap between networks to
help them optimize their own network buys for the greatest reach and efficiency.
Will their be any performance data associated with ad networks? Any plans here?
Consistent with our business of monitoring advertising placements, we are reporting on the advertising impression
delivery that networks achieve in aggregate as well as for individual advertisers and brands.
Will you be using third parties to verify ad network capabilities? If so, which ones?
The service is designed to capture display advertising on web sites and identify the source of the ad – i.e., an
external ad network or a direct placement by the site publisher. Our ad capture technology is able, on its own, to
analyze and identify the internal web page code markup used to request and insert ads. From this, we can identify
the specific ad network.
Who is the target client for this report and will it be freely available, or subscription, etc.?
There are business applications for networks, site publishers, agencies and advertisers. Data access by
subscription.
By John Ebbert
April 28, 2010 – 6:00 pm
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Knowledge Networks Providing Actionable Research
Results In Real-Time Says VP Kahlert
April 2, 2010 – 10:58 am
Florian Kahlert is Vice President of Knowledge Networks, a
research company.
AdExchanger.com: Knowledge Networks is not just a digitallyfocused company. Can you talk about the big picture goals for
the company?
FK: Knowledge Networks is among the top 15 custom survey
research companies in the U.S., and we specialize in solving highimpact business issues. Our big picture goal is to work closely with
clients to create healthy consumer-brand connections and effective
marketing and advertising. Media plays a big role in brand health
and growth and we recognize that our approach must span digital
and traditional mediums.
What problem is Knowledge Networks solving for digital?
Our efforts are focused on helping our clients understand their
Return on Campaign Investment (ROCI) and show them how to
improve it.
KN Dimestore does this by measuring brand focused online
advertising campaigns using traditional brand metrics - like
awareness, purchase intent and consumer attitudes towards a brand and, almost more importantly, by enabling
our clients to optimize campaigns in real time towards those metrics and thus, increase ROCI.
More broadly, KN's Media practice conducts custom, cross-media studies for clients. We also have syndicated
products, for example MultiMedia Mentor which looks at how online and offline media use relates to brand strategy
and media planning and "The Faces of Social Media" which helps CMOs understand the impact of social media
use among their target audiences and how it relates to their categories and marketing efforts.
How do you differentiate from companies in your digital competitive set such as Vizu?
Our key differentiator at KN Dimestore is that our results are actionable in-flight; they can be used in real time to
build look-a-like models for ad targeting and improve Return on Campaign Investment. We also support multiquestion survey designs which many of our clients prefer as they provide more differentiated insight into the user's
preferences and opinions.
What's your view on the online GRP? Do we need one to get brand dollars online?
What we need is a set of metrics that allow clients to understand what the effects will be when they shift, say,
another 5% of a brand's marketing budget from offline to online. How will it affect the overall goals – the brand,
purchase intent, favorability? Telling them they get x clicks or y interactions with a banner is not enough.
Are online GRPs the answer? I am not convinced yet and much of the success would depend on how a GRP
definition for online relates to the existing definition of GRPs in television.
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Is media attribution solvable between online and offline campaign tactics? Or even digital alone? How are
you helping clients here?
Attribution is a tough one and I think sometimes we get too tech focused in the online space. Think about it - how
do you decide to go see a new movie? Its not just ONE particular ad that ultimately makes you buy the ticket.
There are buzz, trailers, reviews, online ads, and all these elements are contributing to the "gotta go see" moment.
Attribution to the last ad you saw before buying the ticket therefore overvalues that impression and undervalues
the other sources that got you to that point. We need to be differentiated, not binary when looking at attribution.
To answer how we at KN help clients: We apply our building blocks – like KN Dimestore, asking questions using
KnowledgePanel, and evaluate purchase outcomes in our National Shopper Lab. We are always working on ways
to combine these resources to get better answers for our clients.
Who are your digital media clients today? Please discuss verticals, agency vs. direct advertisers, etc. Any
trends that you're seeing?
At KN Dimestore we are working with large digital Agencies, DSPs and Networks.
The agencies primarily represent large advertisers – mostly consumer packaged goods, retail, technology
companies, financial services and some pharma clients. Our DSP and Network clients are, for one, very attuned to
the brand client needs but are also very data savvy and utilize our technology to deliver better Return on
Campaign Investment.
If there is one trend that stands out, it is the emerging agreement among all parties involved in brand advertising
that many of the metrics that served us well in DR are clearly not doing the job for brand marketers.
If you were to wave a wand, what would be the one thing you would fix with digital advertising?
For the last 10 or so years ad technology companies have been thinking about media, delivery and technology
mostly in DR terms. I think part of it is the synergy between the mathematical and iterative approach DR
advertisers take and the ability to easily measure the reactions with technology. Waving the wand would make all
of us take a step back and remind us that building brands is different from selling vitamin pills. And that the
question is really – why would or should brand marketers move additional money from traditional sources online.
How does it help the brand? How can we make it easy to move the budgets?
A year from now, what are a few milestones you would like to have seen Knowledge Networks accomplish
on the digital front?
The biggest milestone, and this is not specific to KN but is part of our mission, is achieved when it becomes normal
and expected for every brand campaign to measure awareness, purchase intent and consumer attitudes. That's
when we as an industry are starting to look at outcomes of campaigns that truly matter to the marketer.
What are big media web publishers not leveraging today that they should be?
I am not really qualified to judge all the things they should or should not be doing. However, I notice through our
work profiling web sites that many online publishers have more confidence in the accuracy and value of their user
data than they should. They sell data driven targeting but often the results for advertisers are suboptimal because
the data just isn't accurate enough – data gets stale very quickly.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 2, 2010 – 10:58 am
126
Lijit Networks Enabling Audience Targeting Through Mid
And Long Tail Search Functionality Says COO Knapp
April 7, 2010 – 9:55 am
Walter Knapp is COO of Lijit Networks, a search tool proving analytics to
publishers and audience targeting to advertisers.
AdExchanger.com: What problem is Lijit solving? It appears to be a
couple of problems potentially.
WK: You’re right there are really two problems that Lijit solves. The first is
for publishers. If you think about it, the most interactive component of any
website is the place where readers of that site explicitly interact with the
content by expressing intent to find or transact something. This is done
through the search box on the site. Interestingly, publishers have really not
had a good solution for exposing all of their content and then capturing all of
the fantastically valuable data available through site search. The Lijit
search widget that publishers install on their site, indexes and includes site
as well as social content (Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, photos, videos, etc.).
This means that when a reader performs a search he gets all of your
content in one place thereby exposing more, reducing bounce rates,
increasing time on site, and boosting pageviews. The associated data we
capture through these search boxes is centered on the intent expressions of a publisher’s reader base. We feed
all this data back to our publishers in a real time stats dashboard. All of this is free to the publisher.
The second problem Lijit solves is one of true audience understanding across the mid- and long-tail. We believe
that brand advertising and marketing messages begin with the desire to reach a particular audience in a
compelling and interesting way. Unfortunately the state of audience discovery and targeting online is woefully
inadequate to find the best audience for a particular message. Moreover, our publisher base is comprised of
largely niche and focused content sites where the authors and editors spend nearly all of their time creating and
cultivating engaging content for their readership. Lijit captures audience data across our network of nearly 50M
uniques and enables premium advertisers to reach the right audiences at scale.
Please discuss the current scale of the business from both a reach (and frequency? uniques, queries, geobreakdown, etc.) and revenue perspective.
We have well in excess of 12,000 active publishers in our network, growing at 50+ new sites per day. Our network
has grown from 350M monthly pageviews and 32M uniques when we entered Q1 of this year, to now nearly 50M
uniques and 550M monthly pageviews. We see more than 3M daily uniques that collectively conduct about 1M
queries each day. Because the Lijit search widget is free to online publishers of all sizes and delivers the value it
does, we see unbelievably low churn in our publisher base. We are working on a number of high-profile publisher
deals, but even at current course and speed we should hit 1B monthly pageviews before year end.
What does your competitive set look like? How do you differentiate?
We spend a lot of time surveying the competitive landscape for both site search as well as detailed audience
understanding. On the search side it’s amazing to me that nearly 30% of websites have no search whatsoever,
and about 60% have simply the default search that comes with their CMS platform. Universally, none of our
competition in site search includes site + social content, allows the customization flexibility we offer, nor do they
feed back to publishers the incredible intent data about their readership.
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On the audience side, clearly there are data aggregators and others that are getting really good at leveraging data
to find and deliver audiences. Folks like Audience Science, or DSPs like Turn and Invite Media come to mind. We
look at these folks more like partners in that we have the data they need to drive their platforms and we have the
publisher relationships needed to execute campaigns.
How is Lijit's offering different than Google custom search and why couldn't they offer what you're doing
today?
We have a long standing and very positive relationship with Google and the Custom Search group in particular.
The basic differentiation is that we’ve built a fundamentally different search architecture than the large horizontal
search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo). You can think of our search architecture as a “faceted” search engine
in that every publisher in our network becomes what amounts to the center of their own universe, including not only
their site but also all their associated content sources and network of closely-held or trusted sites. Google is in the
business of delivering the one right answer for any single query. Lijit is in the business of returning the correct
answer for the publishers’ business goals.
Plenty of stress on the supply side these days as you know. What does the publisher get out of a
relationship with Lijit? Why is a "relationship" important?
When I look at the landscape of online or digital advertising, it’s obvious to me that there is still a ton of cash
flowing in from both media spend as well as venture capital investments and this enables companies to spin up
that likely have limited staying power. The calculus we solved at Lijit was: build a huge and growing network of
publishers by delivering to them incredible value through real functionality and reader intelligence. We cracked
that code and the results are extremely low churn, tremendous amounts of audience data, and a trusted
relationship to place premium advertisements across the sites. I think if you simply use money as your relationship
currency as with traditional ad networks, your business is fundamentally an arbitrage model with limited long-term
prospects.
Are you offering search query string data for search retargeting to advertisers or their intermediaries?
What would you say are the differences of intent between your search data and that of pure search
engines like Google's, Yahoo!'s and Microsoft's Bing?
That’s a really good question. One of the things we see in addition of course to on-site search data is the referring
search data coming from Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. The growth of the sheer amount of information online has
trained people to enter ever-longer search queries to find what they want from a search engine. This lengthening
of search strings benefits the mid and long-tail publishers that comprise the vast majority of our network. In fact,
on average 30% of the pageviews across our network occur as the result of a reader coming from a major search
engine. Here’s where it gets interesting: once a reader lands on a site in our network the search queries then
entered on-site are typically very short (1 or 2 words on average) and are very contextually aligned. For instance
one site in our network, VeloNews is the premier cycling-specific magazine and website in the world. When a
reader lands on VeloNews a typical search query would be: “Lance’s Bike”. The answer of course to a cycling
geek like me is the 2010 TREK Madone.
Please identify the types of partners you have and the parts of the business they address.
We have a unique position in the market due to both our strong publisher relationships as well as the audience
data we collect. That enables us to pursue multiple partnerships and revenue channels simultaneously. For
instance, we routinely work with premium brands and agencies to identify very specific audiences for campaigns.
We also have great relationships with nearly all the major Agency Platforms and DSPs. Furthermore, we work with
a select group of partners that want insights into the data we collect. All of this we leverage to benefit our publisher
base by bringing them high quality creative campaigns that appeal to their readership at a higher CPM than they
could attain on their own.
What pivots have you made with the Company to get where you are today?
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When we originally launched the Lijit search offering it appealed primarily to bloggers. After all bloggers are by
nature extremely social and we found they did a lot more content creation online than simply writing their blogs. In
fact, the average Lijit publisher has six additional content sources (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Delicious,
etc.). Over time we matured the offering and the search widget has become an increasingly powerful tool for
publishers that are more commercial in focus. The intent data about their readership and the premium advertising
opportunities we bring to these publishers has been a major turning point in the growth of Lijit.
What's the status of Lijit's funding today?
We were fortunate to have the involvement from the beginning by Brad Feld, Seth Levine and the folks from
Foundry Group. They have a very entrepreneurial attitude, super strong online and digital advertising experience
and have been great partners in building the business. The Foundry guys have a long track record of interesting
investments in the publisher and ad space, notably Feedburner which was acquired by Google in 2007. We’ve
raised just over $11M in 3 rounds from High Country Ventures, Boulder Ventures, and Foundry Group.
What can or will Lijit do to help advertisers and publishers value data?
I think the quick rise of the DSPs and the establishment of Agency buying platforms has shown that there is real
and tangible value in the ability to parse and understand audience data so that messages can be optimized and
delivered to the right place at the right time. The missing side of the equation remains that Publishers lack the
understanding of their audience particularly in a larger context and therefore have little ability to value the unique
reader beyond their core publication. Lijit is in a unique position of being the supply / publisher side of this
equation and we’re working diligently to continue developing this audience insight.
Follow Lijit (@Lijit) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger).
April 7, 2010 – 9:55 am
129
Milabra Optimizing Ad Targeting Visually And Improving
Brand Safety Says CEO Cox
April 14, 2010 – 9:30 am
Sam Cox is CEO of Milabra, an advertising targeting technology
company based on visual or image-based content.
How did Milabra begin?
Milabra the company was founded in October 2008 with the mission
to bring a visual recognition technology platform to market. However,
the Milbra story starts in earlier in 2007 when I met my business
partner Naveen Agnihotri. At the time, he was a few years out of his
post-doctoral fellowship at MIT, where he’d been running the
Neuroscience lab. He had left to try and find commercial
applications for his ideas and capabilities in cognitive science,
pattern recognition and machine vision. He’d already achieved
tremendous academic distinction having worked with two Nobel
Laureates during his MS in Computer Science at the University of
Georgia and his PhD in Neuroscience at Columbia University. In
fact, Naveen’s original PhD work on how the brain sees and stores
memory, contributed to his adviser Eric Kandell winning the Nobel
Prize.
When I saw what Naveen had been working on, I was very
impressed. He had developed a suite of technologies that were able
to identify people, places and things within images. His software was
truly capable of making machines see- not just pixel matching but
concept matching: find a car, not just this specific car. I knew we had
to start a company together.
With technology like Naveen's, there were seemingly limitless
possibilities. The hard part was answering the question "what would that company do?" We had to do two things first, learn how to develop products and not just do custom development projects and second, design a platform
that would be able to harness and unify all of his different technologies into a single architecture that would allow
us to scale horizontally later. Milabra was born once we decided how to architect the company's technology. We
knew that the Milabra Image Intelligence Platform, or Mii, was the key to our success, because we knew it would
allow us to iterate and approach vertical market applications without incurring the high cost of redesign which had
sunk many other companies in the visual recognition space.
We recognized that photos and video were going to be the fastest growing type of content online and would be the
hardest to monetize, so we focused the company on the advertising vertical where adjacency was hard to filter in
real time, and where visual content was not used for targeting. Both could be overcome with our software.
What problem is Milabra solving?
Milabra’s advertising solution is a demand-side technology (DST) that fixes two problems of buying media through
networks and exchanges:
1. We increase the amount of high quality, premium content available for purchase across the Internet. We
do this by identifying and moderating risk factors across any web content when the greatest risk and
reward are exist. This is especially effective when buying audience for premium advertisers.
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2. We empower buyers to optimize their advertising to what the user is seeing in real-time through our visual
optimization process.
The last year has been dominated by conversations about being able to purchase “brand safe” content and
audience-based media across networks and exchanges. The phrase “brand safe” seems to have become
synonymous with the concept of “finding porn”. We realized that for an advertiser, brand safety means much
more. It’s really related to the quality of the user’s advertising experience- finding the right kind of visual content
that is complementary to advertiser’s message (think beach scenes and travel), being able to target to specific
layouts and color schemes on websites, blocking ads from adjacency to not only adult content but “hate imagery”,
brand & logo conflicts or poor quality images (like consumer photos). We really wanted to return the same kind of
editorial controls media buyers and planners had with traditional media back to them across all media on the
Internet.
Unfortunately, the reality of delivering on “brand safe” content has meant that addressable inventory becomes
severely constrained. Brand safe campaigns typically have only been run on a limited number of websites that are
known to have fairly static, well-engineered user experiences with very controlled content (i.e., Comscore 200
sites). Additional safety and site reach has been created recently by semantic technology that allow buyers to
target or anti-target based on the text information the user is reading. The constraints become worse buying
brand-safe audience because the opportunities to deliver become further constrained trying to find those highvalue users again. All of this is wrapped around limited transparency that’s been brought to the process by
verification systems that only give buyers after-the-fact information about when there was an “oops” in delivery to
less-than-desirable content.
Ironically, for display advertising, an inherently visual experience, there has been no way for buyers to make media
decisions based on the total visual environment the user is sees on the page that defines their overall ad
experience. Milabra’s technology can see the image content, image quality, page layout and design and pass that
data back to the ad server for decisioning in real-time. As a result, demand-side players have more safe
impressions available to them and have visual data to optimize their buys. Publishers will benefit too by seeing
increased eCPMs across exchanges and networks.
Discuss your data and media businesses. Where do you see momentum going forward? How does it
breakout percentage-wise - data vs media biz?
We currently run two businesses, both data, and media, and we're split about even between the two. We're getting
a lot of momentum from advertisers because they recognize visual value- they want to find those visual display ad
opportunities while protecting themselves from inappropriate content. However, buying visual media is still a
developing practice, so we offer media as a service to our clients until they feel comfortable buying it on exchanges
directly.
On the data side, we're seeing a real pick up in momentum. Because our service is available through REST APIs,
integrations are generally pretty straightforward. We’re getting good traction with verification companies looking for
a real-time solution, analytics firms that want to better understand how the visual environment affects consumer
behavior and DSPs who are looking for a partner who can add another data-point in their RTB stack. We love the
DSPs and RTB exchanges, and think that our business will grow along side them. Our media business is proof of
demand for our product.
Please provide a use case of how Milabra data is created and the resulting targeting parameters.
It’s a pretty straightforward process, Mii (Milabra Image Intelligence) is given a URL to process. If we’re given a
page URL instead of an image URL, our technology takes a screenshot of the whole page so Mii can analyze the
images and the visual characteristics of the whole page. This is where the technology gets really cool. The Mii
platform takes the image and sends it to our Visual Dictionary for lookup and identification. The Visual Dictionary is
where our Neuroscience technology comes into play. The dictionary “looks” at the image and finds things like
people, places or abstract elements that impact consumer decision making like color, light and volume. The output
from the Visual Dictionary is then sent back to Mii to be delivered to the client. The data is a threshold that
indicates the probability of a match.
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The use of this data depends on who you are. A media buyer can leverage our data to see if the impression they
are about to buy is next to certain types of content (or avoid other types). Publishers generally want to store the
data directly in their CMS for auto-tagging, moderation or ad targeting purposes (passing it into ad tags).
Multivariate testing or dynamic creative shops can use our data to increase advertising performance (for example,
page color matching).
What is a DST? And, why do you call Milabra a DST?
A DST is a Demand Side Technology. Although we produce data, we felt it was important to clearly contrast
ourselves to data players/audience segment providers. We call Milabra a DST because we're not a cookie
technology, but a technology company that works to improve the value of media and the performance of media in
the context of an advertising campaign- what we call the “commercial alignment” of visual data. We don’t just
categorize images and put that data in someone’s database, this information is immediately actionable. However,
because we are a technology solution, we provide value to the entire ecosystem not just one side of the equation.
How do marketers access Milabra data? What types of marketers does this work for? Brand, DR?
Marketers can access our data in several ways: through the exchange on places like AppNexus, where Milabra is
an integrated Data Provider or by placing media buys directly through us. They will also be able to access it soon
through several DSPs, although I'm not at liberty to discuss which at present.
Because the data is rules-based from without manual input, it’s ideally suited to be another tool in the arsenal of
performance marketers who are looking for pockets of gold. Our data allows DR marketers to consistently “see”
the Internet and figure out how to make the visual environment work for a direct response offer. Milabra data is
ideally suited for brand advertisers too, whether they are looking for visual contextual relevance or safe ad
placements. Our software expands scale, reach and availability of additional inventory.
How does the revenue model work for the data?
The model is volume based, rev share or flat fee, depending on the integration, customer type, and volume. We
can integrate throughout the ecosystem and as a result, it’s pretty easy for us to figure out deal terms that work for
our partners.
Is there a connection between what Milabra is doing and data exchanges?
Milabra is not connected to a data exchange. Since we're a data technology, and not a cookie, we're a bit different
than the type of data traditionally traded on data exchanges. If those data exchanges grow to be more than user
segment warehouses, we'll probably start providing Milabra data there, but not in the immediate future.
Do you pay publishers for visual data? How can Milabra help publishers?
We don’t pay publishers, and publishers are not really the focal point for Milabra because of the way they are
aligned with the value chain. What we’re doing is providing transparency about the publisher experience to the
buyer- not reselling data about the publisher’s audience. Although our alignment is on the demand-side we do
work for publishers who are participating on the exchanges because as buyers identify visual elements that are
valuable to their campaigns, they’ll bid-up for those impressions as they are available increasing publisher yield.
That being said we do have some direct integrations with publishers who have a significant amount of user
generated image content (i.e., photo sites). Our data helps them manage their business soup-to-nuts from
business operations to ad operations. Remember, approximately 95% of visual media assets are uncategorized
so it’s a very unwieldy asset to manage- especially for content moderation. Milabra has seen some pretty horrible
things on top sites. Although there may be EULA's in place, they are toothless without enforcement, and there is
very, very little enforcement.
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Because our solution operates in real-time we create a two-tier marketplace for impressions: an expanded set of
premium inventory for risk averse advertisers and identified “risky” inventory set for advertisers who can tolerate
the risk. Our research has found that in general UGC content receive about 60% of the total lifetime of
impressions (commercial opportunities) in the first 24 hours as it’s shared with friends and family (or hopefully goes
viral!). Within 7 days that content fades into the tail to be visited rarely if ever again. Most manual moderation
schemes take 24-48 hours to classify image content and as a result, either most of the commercial opportunity is
lost since there is no data or the risk for a brand advertiser is greatest because most of the impressions are
delivered when the content is not moderated. Using Milabra technology allows publishers to streamline their
revenue management.
What's the status of the company's funding? Will you be looking for more?
Currently Milabra is privately funded. It’s been a good way for us to weather the macro economic storm and the
pullback in investing from VC's, especially on the east coast. As our operations are starting to grow, we're
considering VC investment.
Follow Milabra (@milabra) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 14, 2010 – 9:30 am
133
Magnetic CEO Discusses $1.25 Million Funding And
Company Launch
Email This Post
March 22, 2010 – 12:07 am
Search retargeting technology company, Magnetic, announced the
company's launch and $1.25 million in funding which includes a
roster of investors such as NYC Seed and IA Capital Partners.
Read the release.
Josh Shatkin-Margolis, CEO of Magnetic, discussed the new funding and the company's strategy.
Magnetic (originally Domdex) has been stealth for a while now. Why?
Magnetic operates a marketplace for advertisers and publishers to apply search data to all online advertising. We
did not want to approach the public until we had the fastest growing and most easily accessible source of search
re-targeting data. We wanted to first build the technology, interfaces and the profiles. Now, we’ve built enough
momentum where our advanced algorithms and easy-to-use, self-serve interfaces extract maximum value out of
search data in over 200 million user profiles.
With what kind of investor did your company resonate?
Magnetic’s seed funding of $1.25 million was led by two of New York’s finest venture capital firms, NYC Seed and
IA Capital Partners. The rest of the syndicate includes marquee investors like Founder Collective and multiple
angels from the on-line media and advertising industry. We have partnered with investors that in addition to
possessing high integrity are wickedly smart and experts in on-line media and advertising.
It seems like you’ve raised a small amount compared to some of the recent rounds in ad tech. Do you
anticipate additional rounds of funding in the future?
Being the search data partner of choice for more than 40 leading agencies, ad networks and DSPs, has provided
revenues to help scale the business. Additionally, with advancements in open source technologies, we have been
able to keep our costs down. Nevertheless, we are reviewing other funding options to help scale our market
leading search re-targeting product to meet client need.
What’s the story with the name? How does it relate to the problem your business is looking to solve?
We believe search re-targeting today is the most efficient way to find customers because of the large amount of
display media, strong indication of intent in search data and other market dynamics. However, we wanted a name
that represents us at our core. Magnetic describes the pulling force we provide our customers in finding their
customers.
By John Ebbert
March 22, 2010 – 12:07 am
134
Magnetic Bringing Transparency To Customer Segments In
Display By Leveraging Power Of Search Says CEO
Shatkin-Margolis
April 1, 2010 – 9:23 am
Josh Shatkin-Margolis is CEO of Magnetic, a search retargeting
technology company.
AdExchanger.com: You touched on it in our interview around
your recent funding. What problem is Magnetic looking to
solve?
Targeting advertisements to visitors of websites without direct
knowledge of user intent is difficult. Many targeting and data
companies lack transparency in customer segmentation. To
overcome these problems, we need to harness the power of
search. Sponsored search ads are the highest converting ads on
the internet, perhaps in the world. By using search as the key
indicator intent, we provide better performance and transparency.
Why is search retargeting a powerful opportunity?
In addition to sponsored search ads being the highest converting
ads on the internet, making them a great indicator for intent, search also sits early in the purchase cycle. Users
often search for a product category, consider which product to buy and then purchase. Search re-targeting allows
you to reach the user at the most crucial moment when they are picking a specific product or service.
So how does Magnetic approach it?
Magnetic helps advertisers use search data to re-target customers through all online advertising while they are in
purchase mode. Advertisers can re-target customers who have searched for a set of keywords. This is very
different from re-targeting companies that let you only target those who have searched and then visited your site.
By using search data from the search engine itself, we allow advertisers to reach people that are in purchase mode
for their product but have likely never visited their site.
Are you using keywords in referrals from organic or paid search? How do you build your datasets?
Magnetic compiles data from search engines and website partners that serve sponsored search ads. Our data
comes directly from second tier search engines, toolbars and other sites where users are entering searches.
Please provide a use case. What kind of lift can someone expect from Magnetic’s technology?
For example, a large publisher like MySpace would probably want to increase the CPM they receive when selling
inventory. They could do this by offering an advertiser like Verizon Wireless the ability to target their ad to people
that previously searched for cell phones.
MySpace would create a re-targeting segment, and then traffic Verizon wireless’ creative at that segment at the
higher CPM. MySpace would place the pixel for the re-targeting segment into the Magnetic interface with the target
criteria of “cell phones.” Whenever a user searches for the term in Magnetic’s network of data providing sites and
then visits MySpace, they will see a Verizon Wireless ad for which we expect to see up to 10X lift in click-through
rate.
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How important is service to your product? Can clients use your product without assistance?
The marketplace has an easy-to-use, self-serve interface familiar to data buyers. The advanced technology
enables easy creation of custom segments in a single step. Additionally, we have context-sensitive links to help
documentation throughout the interface, demonstration videos, a full help site with over one hundred help articles
with screenshots and a support tracking system and team that make it easy for us to respond to all questions and
feedback with either an explanation or engineering change.
Who are your key clients? When will the product be available widely?
We are currently testing the marketplace with advertisers, ad networks, publishers, and ad exchange buyers/DSPs
who are running search re-targeted campaigns across a number of industries including automotive, finance,
telecom, retail and CPG.
As for availability, we have a limited number of openings available today for the beta version of Magnetic’s
marketplace for advertisers and publishers to apply search data to all online advertising. The product will be
available widely this spring.
Should we think of Magnetic as bringing search and display together?
We don’t see it as bringing search and display together. We have a wide vision of harnessing the power of search
outside the search engine. We want to use search data as the key indicator across any digital campaign on any
type of online ad.
How do you manage privacy?
Magnetic leads in user privacy standards by targeting keywords, not users. Magnetic implements the best
practices in privacy: human-readable privacy policies, P3P compact privacy policies, W3C policy placement
standards and user opt-out.
Where does Magnetic fit with the data exchange models such as BlueKai and eXelate? Could you work
with them and visa versa?
Blue Kai and eXelate compile structured data from eCommerce sites, for example the one hundred travel
destinations or one hundred automobile models. Magnetic compiles millions of user-entered searches from search
engines and website partners that serve sponsored search ads. Magnetic’s advanced algorithms and interfaces
extract maximum value
out of search data. We could sell search data on these exchanges if we aggregated it into a finite set of categories.
However, we do not because a large amount value and transparency into the keywords is lost when data is
aggregated.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 1, 2010 – 9:23 am
136
Netezza Offering Solution For Big Math, Big Data In Digital
Advertising
February 25, 2010 – 9:03 am
Netezza recently announced its Netezza TwinFin(i) Appliance
which extends data warehousing capabilities and supports the
company's i-Class data analytics platform. (Read the release about
i-Class.) The company's products are gaining traction with digital
advertising tech companies as requisite computational power
rockets.
Netezza’s Brad Terrell, VP and general manager of digital media, and
Michele Chambers, director of advanced analytics product management,
looked how Netezza products apply in digital advertising with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: What is the application here for digital advertising? For example, would a demand side
platform find this system useful - and why?
Netezza: A wide range of analytic applications for digital advertising apply, including but not limited to ad targeting,
Web site optimization, ad inventory and pricing, ad sales forecasting, attribution analysis, network usage, click
fraud detection and keyword portfolio optimization.
Can you define what is meant by "big data" and "big math"?
Big data is petabytes of data. Big math refers to the complex computational processing that’s required for
advanced analytics.
How does pricing work for Netezza's TwinFin(i) Appliance?
List pricing starts at $125K for a system that analyzes up to 10TB of data and goes up from there.
By John Ebbert
February 25, 2010 – 9:03 am
137
Netmining Focused on DR And Performance Marketing For
Now Says Margiloff
April 7, 2010 – 9:26 am
Will Margiloff, Chairman of Netmining and co-CEO of Innovation
Interactive, discussed Netmining's new SiteInsights product which
provides audience insights for a marketer's campaigns. Read
more.
AdExchanger.com: Given Netmining's terminology around "scoring," do you see the Netmining
SiteInsights platform as a solution for lead generation marketers, in particular?
WM: We are clearly focused on direct response and performance-driven marketers right now, as our solutions
directly address their need to drive conversions efficiently. Of course, the scoring algorithm is totally applicable to
brand marketers, as well. Netmining's engine determines each individual's True Interest(SM), what they want -and when and where they'll be most likely to be receptive to the marketer's message. This has tremendous
application for brand marketers looking to deliver the most appropriate marketing messages and creative to each
consumer.
Can you clarify how Netmining is facilitating its ad network? Is it through direct-to-publisher relationships
which means that Netmining tags are in the publisher's ad network stack? Do you ever buy through
exchanges on behalf of your advertising clients?
Both. We are working with publishers through direct relationships and via ad exchanges. Frankly, we work with
each publisher in whatever way gives us the most access to their inventory with the greatest control for both sides.
Placement is still a key targeting input for marketers it would seem - hence Netmining's "Score Per
Referral"? Are placement-focused marketers (such as lead gen-ners) ready for audience buying?
Absolutely. They understand that targeting the appropriate audience drives conversions and with Netmining
SiteInsights, they are able to better understand how audiences from different sources interact with their site. That
will allow them to optimize their site experience and media buying to increase conversion.
Any thoughts on transforming the SiteInsights product to address publishers' needs?
There is no doubt these analytics would be useful for publishers. Right now, the focus is on marketers, but we are
always looking for ways to improve the relationship with have with the publishers we work with.
By John Ebbert
April 7, 2010 – 9:26 am
138
CEO Ellenthal Discusses His New Role At Peer39
April 23, 2010 – 12:47 am
Andy Ellenthal discussed his recent appointment as CEO of
Peer39, a semantic advertising technology company.
AdExchanger.com: Given past roles at DoubleClick, PointRoll
and quadrantONE, what areas of your experience do you think
will be particularly useful as you assume the CEO role at
Peer39?
AE: Certainly each of my previous roles has been tremendous learning experiences. Very little of what I've picked
up along the way represents new thinking, but are outcome of the opportunity to see thousands of online
campaigns.
1. At DoubleClick, I gained a deep understanding of the inner workings of ad delivery, the "plumbing" of the
advertising ecosystem if you will. I also learned that to win nothing beats the overarching importance of
scale.
2. My key takeaways at PointRoll were that the best thought-out and executed media plans can still fail with
lousy creative. Always remember why the user is on a Web page in the first place.
3. quadrantONE reinforced that quality content and the right audience dramatically improve the opportunity
for engagement and the overall effectiveness of online advertising.
So, to answer your question, my experience leads me to believe Peer39 will succeed with massive distribution,
when we marry our solutions with great creative in safe environments and allow advertisers the opportunity to
target their ads within content the consumer finds meaningful.
What do you see semantic technology offering the advertiser? With audience buying the targeting
movement du jour, can semantic play an important role?
I don't think it is a question of "if" or "can" semantics play a role, semantics already do and must continue to be a
critical part of the equation. At the most elementary level, most media buys I see take page meaning into
consideration. Entertainment ads in entertainment sections, B2B ads on business sites, car ads on car sites. You
get the point. We tend to refer to it as placement today. It is manual and manual doesn't scale. Peer39 offers the
ability to read, understand, and classify thousands of pages per second. The end result are ads targeted to the
right pages on the fly.
Audience alone is not enough. Eyeballs are not enough. To drive response or engagement you need to
understand what is on the page.
Can you see semantic technology helping with ad creative? If so, how?
Great creative, in my opinion, is still as much art as science. Bad ads are bad ads period...in print, radio, TV and
online. They will fail to get consumer's attention. Good ads have a higher likelihood of being noticed if the
placement is correct.
But let's take it a step further. Much the same way a retailer can use geographic data to display the right products
in ads dynamically, (snowblowers don't sell well in South Texas regardless of the season), semantics can be used
as an indicator of interest to drive advertising content within the display ad. We're seeing the beginnings of
dynamic ad generation and are looking forward to better targeting these creatives in relevant placements.
By John Ebbert
April 23, 2010 – 12:47 am
139
Quantcast CEO Feldman On Strategic Investment By Cisco
January 4, 2010 – 10:35 pm
Quantcast announced a $27.5 million Series C round of
funding which included investment by Cisco. Read the
release.
Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman answered a couple of
questions for AdExchanger.com about the new
investment.
AdExchanger.com: It seems apparent that Cisco's
investment is strategic. Did you go looking for a
strategic partner specifically with this round?
KF: We've always sought partners who share our belief
and passion in the future of digital media. When we
considered a new financing round we wanted to work with
an organization with technology leadership and a global
presence, and having spent some time with Cisco we felt
they represented a compelling choice for a strategic
investment.
AdExchanger.com: Given Cisco's cross-channel products and services (digital TV, signage, etc.), should
we expect to see more in the near future from Quantcast in areas other than website audience targeting
and measurement? - such as along the lines of your deal with TiVo announced in June?
KF: We believe firmly in the future of addressable media solutions and we're committed to providing our publisher
and marketer customers with innovative solutions for tomorrow's digital media economy, across all the platforms
and devices that may entail. So yes, you'll be seeing more from Quantcast in 2010!
By John Ebbert
January 4, 2010 – 10:35 pm
140
CRO Teresi On MTVN Deal And Quantcast’s Cross-Digital
Potential
February 18, 2010 – 12:26 pm
Quantcast announced a recent deal with MTV Networks in which
Quantcast will offer "audience targeting capabilities on sites in MTVN's
domestic online portfolio, including MTV.com, VH1.com,
ComedyCentral.com and Spike.com, as well as on partner sites in the
company's Tribes vertical ad network." Read the release.
Quantcast CRO Todd Teresi discussed the announcement and its cross-channel, cross-digital potential with
AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: MTVN contains some of the biggest brands in media today and this particular deal
involves video inventory only. It would make sense that the deal expands into display or even marry to
digital TV and the set-top box at some point giving buyers access to the same audience across all
channels. How close is Quantcast to providing this type of cross-digital-channel buying and/or audience
measurement service?
TT: Today, the MTVN deal includes all of their display inventory in addition to the video based inventory. With
Quantcast integrated into its ad server, the MTV sales organization can now provide their marketing partners with
access to audiences from a variety of demographics as well as enable marketers to find their own proprietary
audiences that they have built within the Quantcast Audience system. At Quantcast, we see our platform as a way
to connect publishers and advertisers across any ip-connected digital media assets. To carry through with this
vision, last year we announced a partnership with TIVO that has proven our ability to connect audiences across the
web with those on the TIVO set-top boxes giving marketers unparalleled opportunities to understand their
consumer engagement across mediums and the resulting impact of their marketing campaigns in both mediums.
Continuing our pursuit of the connected digital market, in January we announced an investment from Cisco, a
leading supplier of web infrastructure and set-top boxes, and we are excited about the opportunities that lie before
us. Finally, we recently released our Mobile Web Report showcasing some early work that we have done to begin
to better understand the mobile consumer space. We see a bright future in creating value for publisher and
advertisers by connecting them to the audiences that matter most to them across all digital mediums.
In a Mediaweek article, you say that Comscore's panel system is not allowing for efficient media buying
because media buyers who would be interested in a particular audience end up buying the audience they
don't want, too - creating waste. Does audience measurement need to merge with media buying to be
effective? Would you say they need to be one in the same?
With the proliferation of digital technology, everything becomes addressable. This means that all content, whether
advertising or publishing, can be delivered on a one to one basis and customized to the consumers interests and
desires. To realize the full potential of this opportunity, our understanding of the consumer must evolve from the
historic panel and proxy based approach found in the incumbent measurement companies to a more informed
census based measurement model that has predictive capabilities at an impression by impression level while
respecting a consumer’s privacy. The future of measurement is an integrated supply chain where impression level
audience data is integrated within the advertising and content servers to enable delivery of the proprietary
audiences that marketers and publishers build for each product and consumer engagement that they desire.
Is it right to say that a typical publisher is beginning to understand and accept the data cooperative model,
if you will, where audience data from other sites informs media buyers about the demographics on their
own site - and, moreover, their site's data informs buyers of audience on other sites?
With over 10 million web destinations now participating in the Quantcast Measurement service, including over
2/3rds of the top 100 publishers, and hundreds joining on a daily basis, we would say that the adoption speaks for
141
itself. Additionally with all 10 of the major agencies now using the service, we feel that marketers are now
embracing the importance of audience level planning and delivery. However, to clarify, all publishers who
participate in our measurement program have complete control over their own data and no individual publisher or
advertiser’s data can be accessed by another without the explicit consent of that advertiser or publisher. Unlike
many data companies and ad networks, Quantcast never resells an advertiser’s or publisher’s audience to another
third party so all of our advertisers and publishers can use Quantcast with peace of mind.
By John Ebbert
February 18, 2010 – 12:26 pm
142
Quantcast’s Feldman On Delivering Local Country
Audience Insights
March 11, 2010 – 12:16 pm
Quantcast announced yesterday that they are offering their traffic data
and audience insights globally by local country.
CEO Konrad Feldman discussed the company's global push.
AdExchanger.com: How did you determine that Quantcast is the "World's Favorite Audience Measurement
Solution"?
KF: Every week thousands of websites choose Quantcast to provide them with audience measurement and
insights. We think of audience measurement as being the "who" and that's distinct from the "what" of web
analytics. We're not aware of any audience service that's been as widely adopted as Quantcast - are you?
Outside of the U.S. market, which countries or areas of the world show particular surges of interest in
audience measurement services?
We've seen strong interest in our solution from overseas publishers that had significant US audiences that they
wanted to better monetize. Increasingly those publishers were asking us what we could do for their home markets
and we're delighted to be able to support them more fully, not just in their home marketers, but in every market.
And, from your standpoint, is audience buying everywhere?
Certainly in the major digital media markets it is, though of course to varying degrees. Increasingly marketers are
looking to coordinate and standardize their approaches to audience insights and real-time media on a global basis.
By John Ebbert
March 11, 2010 – 12:16 pm
143
Rapleaf Focusing On Social Data And Enabling Advertisers
To Buy Audiences That Have Affinities With Their Brand
Says CEO Hoffman
February 1, 2010 – 7:33 am
Auren Hoffman is CEO of Rapleaf, a company which provides
social data about a company's audience.
AdExchanger.com: Tell us about Rapleaf's history.
AH: Rapleaf’s vision is to understand people. Like Google
understands URLs, we want to better understand people.
What problem is Rapleaf solving?
At our core, we’re about helping companies understand their
existing customers and find new customers. We do this by
analyzing the “social data” of people. Social media data (blogs,
forums, social networks, discussion boards, etc.) is an emerging
source of information on people. Rapleaf is helping organize the
massive volume of public data being made available, and
providing that to end users in meaningful ways that provide unique insight.
What is your core dataset?
We focus on social data – which includes the social graph, interests, affinities, and demographics.
AdExchanger.com: How are clients buying audience with Rapleaf's help? And, do you work with demandside platforms?
Today, Rapleaf is plugged into several DSPs, and we work with several ad networks. We offer unique segments
like “Online Influencers”, “Active Twitter Users”, “Fans of X Brand”, etc. Advertisers come to us today to buy
audiences that have affinities with their brand and also a high potential to spread a message online.
Who is in your competitive set? Why?
We’re a data provider, so our model is not about selling media space, but more focused on providing targeted
audience data.
What are you focused on beyond display? How do you see this product like working with display-related
product initiatives?
We help companies both acquire customers and better engage their current customers. To acquire customers, we
help companies better target their display advertising. Display advertising can be effectively used to find the right
audiences for your product. We also help companies engage their current customers by understanding their
customer base for email, on-site outreach, and retargeting... We do a lot of work with retailers, hotels, airlines,
large brands, and more to help them better understand their customers for personalization and advanced targeting.
Can you explain how your social data works with brand marketers?
144
Social data is different than in-market data, as it does not necessarily indicate intent, but instead it indicates a
persistent affinity to something. For example, if you follow “Apple” on Twitter, you may not necessarily be looking to
buy a Mac at this moment, but you are a brand advocate and represent a certain profile to brand marketers.
What are your thoughts around online data exchanges? Are you or will you use them?
We’re testing several data exchanges and think they have a future in organizing data. We think they will play a
very important part making advertising on the Internet more relevant and less spammy. We likely will grow the
exposure of our data in the exchanges over the coming months, as the combination of our data and intent data (i.e.
an Apple fan who is in-market for a computer) can be very powerful.
What's the biggest pain point for Rapleaf for its product lines?
Reach is one of the most important things for any data provider, and we’re always investing in growing our reach.
Additionally, it’s important to get close to the media buyer. But our biggest pain point will also be finding and hiring
great people ... we encourage your readers to learn about Rapleaf and apply here.
Any thoughts on how web publishers should be managing their data? What sort of tips might you have for
the publisher given your data specialization?
Publishers can think creatively about what unique data set they can provide. Most importantly, however, publishers
should focus on what they do best: providing amazing experiences to their audience.
Follow Auren Hoffman (@auren), RapLeaf (@RapLeaf) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
February 1, 2010 – 7:33 am
145
Rapleaf Enhancing NetProspex Contact Database,
Discusses B2B Social Data
March 2, 2010 – 12:07 am
Rapleaf announced a partnership with NetProspex, as Rapleaf will
enhance NetProspex' marketing contact database with "a social
layer of data" with the goal of allowing "B2B marketers to
successfully decipher the social demographics of business
prospects and customers." Read the release.
Joel Jewitt, Rapleaf's VP of Business Development, discussed the
partnership and B2B social data.
AdExchanger.com: What unique benefits does accurate social data present the B2B marketer?
JJ: Millions of professionals are now maintaining social profiles about themselves that can help the B2B marketer
understand them in important ways. The outward face that business people show to the marketplace now usually
include public Linkedin pages, some public portion of their Facebook profiles, their Twitter presence, and often
many other sites like Myspace, etc. Because of this, B2B marketers now increasingly have the responsibility to
understand professionals on many more levels than just their title and company. By taking into account all of this
new information, B2B marketers can communicate with them in ways that are much more meaningful.
Given the B2B focus of this partnership with NetProspex, is B2B or B2C core to Rapleaf's business? Or do
you even see it this way?
A key mission of Rapleaf is to help businesses access the public information available about professionals and
consumers, and use it in responsible ways to improve their ability to begin and maintain new kinds of relationships.
These new kinds of relationships are characterized by communications that are much more meaningful than in the
past when professionals and consumers didn’t invest energy to publish information about themselves to the
community. Now that people are taking the time to create and maintain what are basically microsites about
themselves, with a lot of information about their characteristics and preferences, B2B and B2C marketers need to
listen and incorporate this in their marketing or they will be left behind.
How do you address privacy concerns around social data being married to the NetProspex database?
Rapleaf only links to data that is public; published by people to the outside world. Any data that is marked private in
any way is not accessed by us.
By John Ebbert
March 2, 2010 – 12:07 am
146
Scout Analytics Bringing Actionable, Behavioral Insights
To Publishers Says SVP Shanahan
April 27, 2010 – 4:02 am
Matt Shanahan, SVP of Strategy for Scout Analytics, a behavioral
analytics platform for publishers.
AdExchanger.com: What problem is Scout Analytics looking
to solve?
Scout Analytics helps publishers price, negotiate and deliver on ad
campaigns by addressing three challenges: segmentation,
accuracy, and prediction. A publisher that has deeper
segmentation can create customizable packages and perform price
discrimination of those packages. With more accuracy about reach
and frequency, the quality of the publishers impression increase
and allow for further pricing negotiation. Finally with prediction, a
publisher has a better forecasting on the inventory of impressions
during negotiations to provide confidence on performance to plan.
What is the challenge with cookies for marketers looking to
count their users, let alone target them and getting them to
register?
Cookies are highly precise but terribly inaccurate. A cookie is a
small file on the computer that registers if this browser has
accessed the site previously or not. The first challenge is that these
files are routinely deleted by visitors which overstates reach of
impressions and understates frequency. The second challenge is
that cookie counts are a measurement of unique browsers, a proxy
for visitors but not actual visitors. In a recent study published, Scout
Analytics showed that actual unique browsers overstate actual
unique visitors by 2-4X. In this case, the reach and frequency
measurements on impressions have a high degree of error. Scout
Analytics leverages a technology called device signatures to overcome the limitations of cookies and build a
deeper profile of visitors, especially anonymous visitors.
Why focus on B2B websites rather than B2C?
Publishers are in the midst of transition to digital and in need of a new breed of tools for audience development.
B2B has some advantages over B2C in terms of tackling the challenges of segmentation and prediction.
B2B publishing is by definition relies on advertising to niche audiences. In B2B, there is wealth of untapped online
data to create deeper segmentation for use by publishers and advertisers. For example, anonymous B2B visitors
have IP addresses to target based on geography and on the organization that owns the domain (i.e., industry
specific or even company specific campaign). In addition to the rich segmentation collected in session data,
external data sources can be easily integrated with visitor data to build deeper and deeper segmentation.
Another leverage point is the fact that B2B websites are linked directly to business processes which can be used to
be more predictive. Mapping visitor behavior to common business cycles gives a publisher a lens on visitor activity.
Is a visitor using the site for a one-off project or routine processes (e.g., daily, weekly, quarterly, or yearly)? Even
topic affinity by industry provides predictive power to a publisher knowing how visitor demographics will change
based on news or what is driving economic activity by industry.
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What do you report out to the publisher? Any examples you can provide of actionable data?
Scout Analytics reports visitors and companies and their relative ranking in terms of visitor loyalty (i.e., likeliness to
return). Detail visitor loyalty reports identify patterns such as days, time, location, and topics of visits (e.g., when
and why is a visitor likely to return) and can be used to predict reach and frequency of impressions. Scout
Analytics also reports what factors correlate to visitor loyalty such as topic, industry, location or other factors.
Armed with this information, Scout Analytics provides target visitors to editorial, audience development, and ad
operations for building and monetizing loyalty.
Do you provide datasets that can be used for ad targeting?
Yes, Scout Analytics can provide visitor level information to include segmentation as well as loyalty scores. In
particular, the loyalty scores allow for serving offers according to the level of engagement of the visitor.
Given privacy concerns regarding online advertising, your company appears to be focused on overcoming
it by getting users to agree to the publishers terms. Fair statement?
Building and monetizing an audience requires publishers take responsibility for establishing privacy terms between
the audience, themselves, ad networks, and advertisers. In that regard, the publisher needs to appropriately inform
all parties about the "rules" of engagement and ensure compliance. That means visitors need to agree to a
publisher's terms. Ultimately, the visitor has control in regards to online advertising by opting out (i.e., don't use the
site).
How does Scout Analytics revenue model work?
Scout Analytics is a software-as-a-service offering. The licensing is an annual subscription model. The pricing is
based on 4 tiers for small, medium, large, and extra large sites.
How big is the company? Have you taken any funding? Do you anticipate a round in the future?
We currently have 18 staff and have taken funding from Ignition Partners, RRE, and OVP venture firms. Our
current funding allows us to build and grow the business organically.
A year from now, what milestones would you like the company to have achieved?
Scout Analytics believes increased accuracy of campaign metrics are fundamental to improving advertising spend
efficiency. We hope to establish the standard for online measurement accuracy. When combined with predictive
analytics, we would like to see the efficiency of advertising spend increase 50%+. Our delivery on that goal will
have doubled our customer base, made us profitable, and given us good growth options.
Follow Scout Analytics (@ScoutAnalytics) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 27, 2010 – 4:02 am
148
TARGUSinfo Integrates Data Into Demdex Behavioral Bank, Discusses The Data Biz
March 10, 2010 – 2:55 pm
TARGUSinfo and Demdex announced a partnership which integrates
TARGUSinfo datasets into Demdex's "'Behavioral Bank' [which is] full of
robust user profiles with data captured from each client's Web properties and
third-party data purchases." Read more.
Dave Helmreich, VP AdAdvisor at TARGUSinfo, discussed the partnership,
the company and trends in the data market today.
AdExchanger.com: Why do you think being "neutral" is important in Demdex model and how is this
compelling for TARGUSinfo?
DH: The data marketplace is a moving target and it would be impossible to predict which current and future
technologies will perform best for your business. As a neutral party, Demdex gives its clients the maximum
flexibility for plugging their data into any of the delivery platforms in each channel. Whether it's the latest DSP to
enter the market in display, an existing ad server that's been around for years, or some new creative optimization
technology coming onto the market in the coming months, when you have a neutral audience management
platform you remain 100% flexible and can to adapt to this rapidly changing marketplace. Remaining neutral on
the data side is also important as this allows clients to access ALL data sources available in the market, not just
those available from a given exchange or data seller. Neutrality is really what sets Demdex apart. Through our
partnership, any clients using Demdex have a streamlined way to access AdAdvisor data to enhance interactions
with their ideal prospects.
How does TARGUSinfo help data buyers purchase the right data? And, do you let them test to make sure
the data will meet performance requirements?
There are three ways we help advertisers understand the ideal target audience for their brand. We have hundreds
of standard audience groups for everything from people likely to carry an American Express Gold Card to those
likely to prefer to stay at budget hotels. We can also leverage the Demdex platform to help advertisers observe the
groups of people most likely to respond to a particular campaign so that the advertiser can specifically reach more
people in these groups. Finally, because AdAdvisor data originated at the household level offline, we are able to
partner with advertisers to create custom audiences based on their actual customer data.
What are your strongest data segments today?
The power of AdAdvisor lies on our ability to accurately identify people who are likely to exhibit a certain behavior
and help advertisers reach them online. Given this, there is not really a particular segment that "performs" best as
it is different for every advertiser. By providing a reliable way to identify ideal prospects and scale campaigns
based on performance, we are helping advertisers in industries ranging from finance to telecom to consumer
packaged goods.
What's in it for the publisher and the supply-side in an announcement like this?
With AdAdvisor, publishers have a powerful way to improve targeting on their sites by leveraging data such as
basic demographics, life stage insights or product propensities. The technology that Demdex has brought to
market can help them do this.
By John Ebbert
March 10, 2010 – 2:55 pm
149
VisualDNA Using Visual Methods To Enable Effective Ad
Targeting Says CEO Wilcock
April 12, 2010 – 11:41 am
Alex Willcock is Founder and CEO of Imagini Holdings Limited, an
advertising technology company and makers of VisualDNA.
AdExchanger.com: Please give us a bit of history about
VisualDNA. A new company? Or pivoting for new opportunity?
AW: I founded the business because I saw an opportunity to change
the relationship between commerce and consumers – to put
consumers in control and give them the opportunity to say what it is
that they want and need and for commerce to respond accordingly. It
seemed to me that eventually, users will want to be fully in control of
all their data and I wanted to provide them with a means of doing this
easily.
My background is retail and I had seen the compelling and often
extraordinary patterns that exist in a consumer's buying behavior. I
was inspired to create a visual method for people to tell the story of
their life and connect them with the things that that wanted and
needed.
The business began in earnest when I launched a simple site that
enabled people to profile themselves and get some personality
feedback. I sent out less than 40 emails to friends to promote it and in
less than 6 weeks we had over 1 million users and rapidly another 4
million and now, over 20 million.
What problem is VisualDNA solving today?
We provide very rich data about the users that are visiting a given site and enable these users to be targeted with
advertising and content to a degree of accuracy that is, we believe, currently unparalleled.
We understand why a user acts in the way that they do. BT products are good at understanding what a user has
done, but not very good at knowing why. The implications are that we can infer user actions in a very compelling
way.
VisualDNA gives publishers and data buyers the opportunity to understand exactly who is coming to which part of
the site and target them on a one-to-one basis.
Our inference algorithms are able to predict the behavior of non-profiled users based on the actions of profiled
users. For instance, for 100 % of users we can currently predict gender with a 69% accuracy, age band with a 48%
accuracy and the 20 main interest tags of each user with a 46% accuracy.
What type of technology is Visual DNA using?
We profile users using our visual quizzes that are typically deployed as HTML microsites that are linked to from
publisher sites or as HTML widgets that are embedded in publisher sites. We also have a full REST API that
allows publishers to build their own front end if they wish. The API accesses our Service Orientated Architecture
that includes a User Service and Feedback Service, among others.
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Behind each image is a rich contextual taxonomy and series of behavioral axes, (over 40). With every click, the
user produces more tags. On average, we collect 50-100 tags per quiz.
Once a user has taken a quiz we store their profile in our data store and assign a unique anonymous id to the user
that we place in a visualdna.com cookie. At any time, users can visit my.visualdna.com to see, edit and delete the
data that we have stored.
The publisher that collected the profile can access that user's profile through our client side JavaScript API that first
transfers the cookie to the publisher's domain and then calls our data store. We have a permission framework to
control who is permitted to access a user's data via the API. The JavaScript API enables publishers to build
personalized features into their site, but we also provide widgets that sit on top of the API and can be embedded
into a site very easily.
For example, our "Top stories for you" news site widget users our collaborative filter via our Relevant Content
Service. The collaborative filter finds the users with most similar profiles that have accessed the site in the last 24
hours, collates the stories that those users have read and recommends these stories back to the user. Click
through rates on our recommended content are 37% higher compared to showing the most popular stories of the
day for all users.
We also integrate with major Ad Servers to enable publishers to sell impressions of specific audiences to their
advertisers. For example, publishers who use DART can deliver ads to specific audiences using the Boomerang
extension to DFP. It is straightforward for advertisers to buy
"sports lovers" or "female, hikers" or "photography
enthusiasts, family with young children", for example, and straightforward for publishers to traffic ads at these
audiences.
Can you discuss a use case of how a consumer might interact with VisualDNA initially?
Consumers are invited to take a VisualDNA quiz via ads and editorial links on our partners' sites. They answer
questions about themselves by choosing from a selection of images, and get feedback on what their choices say
about who they are. They can also get relevant content matched to their VisualDNA, for example the product that
we have launched for the LA Times filters the news stories of the day and shows the reader the most relevant
articles for them. Try it here - http://latimes.visualdna.com
We've launched quizzes on a wide range of topics including Travel, Dating and Health. Our core Personality quiz
consistently proves itself to be the most popular with consumers, which enables us to collect a very rich, broad set
of data.
Our philosophy is that we put the user first; we always make sure that they get more than we take. How are
you selling this data today? What is your target market in terms of clients?
Our clients are both sellers and buyers of data. Specifically, publishers that wish to increase the value of their
inventory and buyers that wish to immerse their brands in highly relevant audiences.
We are working with a number of different partners to provide rich data on their users. We sell the products that
create the data and often ring-fence that data for the partner, but this depends on the specific deal.
We have just launched a free Audience Analytics product that publishers can use to develop the content on their
site and sell their ad spots as premium inventory - this is a free service. Our goal is to make this a perfect partner
to Google Analytics, where GA gives you excellent data about the stats of your users, Audience Analytics tells you
who they are, and what motivates them. We'll soon be providing tracking code and an inference service as well.
We are also in discussion with a number of Ad Networks for to white-label this product.
We monetize VisualDNA by making the data available for real-time targeting via our API and integration into ad
targeting platforms such as DFP.
151
Currently we are working primarily with publishers to help them collect and use the data themselves to personalise
content and deliver more relevant advertising. We are now seeing great interest from Ad Networks, Demand Side
Platforms, Data Exchanges and Media Agencies. Our work to date with Ad Networks has delivered some very
exciting data, such as increases in CTR of up to 83% and increases in interaction rates that are over 700%.
We are in the process of opening up our data for buyers to target against and we'll be publishing more detail on
this in the coming weeks.
Can you discuss your research methodology? How do you know what an image means for a user?
We're replicating the instantaneous decisions that we all make on a daily basis and, by looking at the pattern of
these choices, we understand the core traits of an individual. It is the pattern that is all-important, as well as the
individual image choice.
One way to think about it is to consider a consumer standing in a grocery store in front of a wide range of products.
Not everyone buys the same brand and we make choices for a whole variety of reasons, such as color, font,
packing material, lighting, price, brand values etc. If you then look at the assortment of products in someone's
basket at the grocery counter, you will often see a pattern to their choices.
Our job is to make sure that with each question, we are placing a variety of realistic choices in front of the user. We
score each image using a patented methodology and learn the patterns of choices based on the scores and tags
that come from our taxonomy. I can't go into the methodology in detail as it is proprietary.
Responding to images elicits an instant emotional response that is inextricably linked to our core personality traits.
We work with many different disciplines of psychology and have drawn in particular on the 'Big 5' Personality
Profiling methodologies to develop our quizzes and guide the image selection process.
A quiz will capture a range of information from core personality traits like openness, creativity & extraversion,
through to preferences around style and highly actionable information such as purchase intent and brand choices.
We continuously analyse the VisualDNA data - from the 20 million profiles to date - to verify the consumer
interpretation of the imagery. It is fascinating how consistent some images and concepts are in identifying a user
'type'.
We have proven that it is the concept of the image that is important and not the actual image. For example, when
asked about the concept of freedom, one group will consistently chose examples of ‘being at one with nature' –
whatever the image that is used to signify this.
We have found that the more abstract the concept, the more universal the images are. It's as if there is a primal
relationship that we have with core traits. Other, more superficial subjects such as style, of course vary from
country to country.
How does a publisher use your VisualDNA results? How does an advertiser use it - what might be typical
targeting parameters?
A publisher can use our VisualDNA data in a number of ways. First, they can access the full profile data via our
VisualDNA API allowing them to personalize a site or page as desired. Second, publishers can embed our
recommended content widgets to deliver personalized recommendations to users. Our recommendation engine
works with any type of content including page URLs, products, search queries and RSS feeds. We track the
content that profiled users consume and then recommend back to users the content that the users most similar to
them have also consumed.
Third, a publisher can sell impressions of specific audiences to advertisers. For example, a news site can sell
impressions of ‘Sports Lovers' across their entire site. They can also be far more detailed, enabling audiences to
be bought that display core motivations that fit a given brand's values and segments.
152
We have integrated VisualDNA with DFP Boomerang, to make it easy for publishers to sell audiences in the same
way that they are currently selling placements. We are currently looking at other integrations.
We have a vast amount of data and can provide targeting parameters to fit a buyers needs.
Please give an example of expected lift for the publisher and for the marketer.
A publisher can expect uplifts in click through rates on content of over 30% and dependent on the Advertising
inventory available, uplifts in CTR of over 300%. There are many other metrics though such as increased time on
site, interaction rates and the pages viewed by profiled users over non-profiled users. We are seeing increases in
page views per visit in excess of 100% currently.
What is VisualDNA's revenue model(s)? Do you share with publisher partners, too, or is the value in the
reporting? Please discuss.
Dependent on the scale of customization, we provide standard audience analytics and insight free of charge and
then charge on a CPM or share of revenue uplift when profile data is used to deliver personalized content or more
relevant advertising.
The revenue uplift on a publisher site will come from increased page views and/or increased CPMs on ad
inventory. In this way publishers only pay when our technology generates real value for them.
What's the difference between what behavioral targeting offers and VisualDNA's offering?
VisualDNA is focused helping users get a personalized web experience and more relevant content and
advertising. We are able to collect accurate information about a user's interests, tastes and aspirations that are not
necessarily detectable through their online behavior.
We understand the why as well as the what. We are also able to predict profiles for users who have not taken the
quiz by comparing the behavior of these users to the behavior of users who have taken the quiz. Publishers can
then deliver personalized content and more relevant advertising to these users too.
How do you enable tracking of a user's profile while maintaining appropriate standards are around PII
(personally identifiable information)?
We don't capture any "personally identifiable information" about our Users and so we are unable to attribute
VisualDNA data to specific individuals.
VisualDNA data, which includes the User's string of image responses to a VisualDNA Quiz, is only stored if the
User gives us permission to do so.
At the end of a VisualDNA Quiz, the user is given the ability to opt out of having their VisualDNA data saved but
they are also given an explanation of the benefits of saving their VisualDNA data, a link to our privacy policy and
details of how to manage (update or delete) the VisualDNA information we hold about them at any time on
my.visualdna.com.
Users that provide permission are cookied. Our cookies store an anonymous User ID and only permitted partners
are able to access the VisualDNA data associated with that ID.
We are strong advocates of User privacy and seek to be transparent in all our dealings.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 12, 2010 – 11:41 am
153
Digital TV, Video and Radio
With Launch of Adap.tv’s Online Video Ad Marketplace,
CEO Ashkenazi To Leverage Innovation From Ad Networks
And Agencies
February 24, 2010 – 12:09 am
Amir Ashkenazi is CEO of adap.tv, an online video advertising
marketplace.
AdExchanger.com: Let's start with a bit of background. Has adap.tv
always been a video ad exchange or marketplace? You've been
around for a while, correct?
AA: Yes. We developed Adap.tv OneSource, ad serving and management
platform, that is being used currently by hundreds of publishers. We
literally were wiring the ecosystem in a world that lacks standards and
innovating very frequently on formats. We realized that the monetization
of video is just extremely difficult without the right technology platform, so
we decided to develop exactly that. In the process, we also learned that
technology, or the wiring, is only half of the problem. The second half is
actually in the process of buying and selling.
When you get two or three calls a week from buyers looking for more
inventory, and we have almost daily conversations with publishers looking
for more revenue, you understand that something does not work.
So we decided to take another step in solving the video monetization
problem and develop the ideal marketplace for video buyers and sellers.
Are you concerned about others, such as Google, jumping in the
space? Yahoo and Google have significant display ad exchange
models, couldn't they just swoop in and grab your advertisers and
publishers?
That's a great question. We built the Adap.tv marketplace from the ground
up for video, and for quality publishers. And those are two differentiators, I would say, versus the exchanges out
there. This is, by the way, exactly why we chose to call it a marketplace and not an exchange. And when you look
deep into the product, the control of give buyers and sellers, the information we provide to them, the large pool of
video inventory and the wide support of video-specific formats, you realize that there is a significant gap in the
capabilities between what we provide and what display exchanges provide today.
Can demand-side platforms effectively manage cookie databases such that their display inventory can be
mapped to the video inventory that they're buying? And if not, when, and how do we get there?
Absolutely. Demand-side platforms are important in the evolution of media buying. And we are working with many
of them, with plans to integrate all of them, to provide them with access to video inventory.
We provide APIs that allow them to access the publisher inventory and give them all the capabilities they need
when it comes to targeting. So we found interest and great partnerships with many of them.
154
How do you expect the IAB's VAST standard to impact your business? If it didn't exist, would an ad
exchange be possible for video, or a marketplace be possible for video?
Standards are very important, and we support all the VAST and VPAID standards. But, the thing is that those are
the early days of video advertising, and we see rapid innovation coming from ad networks and ad agencies that
cannot be captured immediately in those standards. This is why we think that having the platform across hundreds
of publishers is giving us an advantage and making us uniquely positioned to provide trading platforms for buyers
and sellers in video.
Are you thinking right now, for the marketplace, that initially it's going to be about buying and selling
pre-roll, but down the road it's in-stream and other formats as well?
Yes. Our platform is extremely flexible, and very quickly we adapt to any format buyers want to buy and sellers
agree to sell. So we are probably not going to be the innovators when it comes to formats, but we will quickly adapt
our marketplace to those leading formats.
What do you tell video publishers who are concerned their CPMs are going to drop through the floor as
your marketplace gets traction?
We actually believe CPMs will go up. This is a supply-constrained environment, and what's keeping prices and
overall monetization down is the friction in the process. So the fact that we open for sellers a world of opportunities,
while keeping them in control - control over pricing, control over the buyers they work with, even control over the
campaigns they allow in, control over the way their inventory is presented in the market - you take it all, together
with the fact that buyers can now easily access a large pool of inventory, applying their own targeting data, and I
think what you'll see is buyers finding online in-stream video to be more extensible, more easily bought and,
therefore, I believe they'll spend more. And as an industry, that's our goal.
What are video ad networks looking for these days when they work with adap.tv?
Ad networks like the immediate access to a large pool of inventory. They like the transparency and control that
they get when buying through the platform. And they like the ability to bring their own targeting - targeting data and
algorithms.
Do you see audience buying in the marketplace today? Also, do you see a need for an understanding the
content being viewed?
Yes. We definitely see an increase in using audience targeting, but within publisher or content-quality constraints.
So it's not the wild west of "Let's find this viewer, wherever he is." It's "Let's find the viewers within the context we
feel comfortable with."
What sort of bidding parameters do you offer?
Buyers and sellers get up-to-the-second information about market conditions. It is aggregated, it does not expose
individual buyers and sellers, but it gives them the information and the tools that they need to make smart
decisions.
From the publisher’s perspective, the market opens for publishers a stream of offers that is not on their radar
screen. Even large publishers cannot be in front of every buyer and have every buying opportunity presented to
them.
By opening it up, you basically gain visibility to the value of your site and the value of the content.
As noted in the Ad Age article the buying that is done is not in real time today. And if that is true, it is not
real time, then how can a buyer truly see who the audience is, as in look at the cookie and in real time
decide what to bid? How does that work?
155
Let me explain. We do facilitate now real time buying; not yet real time bidding, but real time buying. Meaning the
buyer can make a buy or no-buy decision in real time, given the cookie data and additional information about the
view.
At some point, will real time bidding be a part of the marketplace, or is it even necessary?
I think the real innovation is not so much the real-time versus delayed. It is more about allowing buyers, whether
those are ad networks, or demand side platforms, to leverage their targeting capabilities across a large number of
publishers.
Softball for you -what do you think about online video as an opportunity for brand dollars?
Online video advertising is the Holy Grail. It combines the power of TV advertising with the interactivity,
measurability and sophisticated targeting of online advertising. We are excited about our part in pushing this
industry forward.
When you look back a year from now and see what has happened with Adap.tv's marketplace, what might
a few key milestones look like?
I think in Adap.tv, and many of the other companies that work in this space are actually focused on growing the
pie. It is not so much about the competition with other companies right now. It is about making online video
scalable, effective marketing vehicle for the leading brands.
Follow adap.tv (@Adaptv) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
February 24, 2010 – 12:09 am
156
Auditude Offering Automated Video Management Platform
And Supporting VAST Says CEO Cahan
January 28, 2010 – 2:29 am
Adam Cahan is CEO of Auditude which provides a technology platform for
video management and monetization.
AdExchanger.com: Please provide some background. How did Auditude
begin?
AC: Auditude was founded in 2005 around our Content ID/fingerprinting
technology. In 2007, we took our first round of institutional financing and
began to build the team we have in place today. We have fingerprinted over
100 channels of broadcast television since 2005, which powers our Content
ID offering. In 2008, we launched our complementary video ad management
platform, Auditude Connect. Our ad platform customers include Major League
Baseball, MySpace, MTV Networks and Yahoo!. Some of the largest names
in content, websites and advertising trust us to manage their online video
assets and monetization.
We’re headquartered in Palo Alto, CA with offices in New York, Los Angeles
and London.
What problem is Auditude trying to solve and for whom?
Auditude is helping create a viable business model for premium online video by making video advertising truly
manageable in a highly distributed and complex environment. Imagine all the business rules and challenges that
occur when premium video such as TV content migrates online. There are many questions that arise including how
to deal with advertiser exclusions, manage multi-party selling (websites, content owners, and third parties),
incorporating new ad products as well as managing the overall consumer experience. This is in addition to
forecasting and accounting for revenue shares, and delivery across multiple sites in real time.
We’ve spent a lot of time on our product removing and automating a lot of these challenges by trying to apply
display advertising models to video content. We’ve taken a holistic approach to delivering ad management
capabilities that deal with content, context and user interaction. We believe that we can help solve some of the
challenges through scaling capabilities and, thus, see more content and consumption continue to increase online.
Our core customers are the business owners and ad operations teams for content owners and websites that
handle online video. Those content owners and websites use the Auditude Connect platform to manage their ad
products, targeting, delivery, reporting and syndication needs in real-time.
Ultimately, we’re here to help grow the business of online video by making it easier for websites to offer advertisers
the ability to buy premium online video at scale. We believe that is what will truly accelerate the distribution of
premium content online.
What pricing models do you offer?
Our ad platform/server, Auditude Connect, is licensed through revenue share and CPM models.
Please discuss your competitive set.
157
We believe we are pretty unique in our approach to managing and monetizing online video. Specifically we’ve
focused on how to make our ad management platform “content aware”.
What we mean by this is the ability to truly manage multi-faceted, complex interactions between user, advertiser,
content owner and publisher with scale. Our competitive set tends to be the installed base of legacy systems that
were designed for display advertising with video as an ad-on. There are a few areas we feel we are distinctive
including: automation of content ingestion; managing multi-party sales and demand in real-time; incorporating
business rules, and exclusions in a highly distributed environment; supporting flexibility in ad products and pricing
models; and real-time reporting and forecasting.
How will standardization of video ad formats help propel the video advertising industry? How long until
standardization finally becomes a reality?
We have to be careful when we talk about standardization that we not lead advertisers or the industry to believe
that this means simplification of ad formats. In fact, we fully support and believe that new ad products should
continue to enter the market. That said, standards for this industry are about how we all benefit from metrics as
well as interoperability.
Standardization in the form of metrics and interoperability of video ad formats will make video advertising more
prevalent, easier for advertisers to buy at scale, easier for publishers and content owners to manage and more
profitable for everyone. We’re very active and support the developments that VAST and VPAID are bringing to the
market. These standards are becoming more pervasive in our industry and it allows for us to partner across ad
serving systems.
We expect to see significant gains in this area in the next 12 months.
Looking at large media companies today, what recommendations would you make to these media
publishers given the rapid evolution of technology in advertising?
Anticipate innovation. Do not implement platforms, or any other technology for that matter, with closed or
proprietary systems. The ad product that you’re deploying today is drastically different than the ad products you
were running 6-months ago. The same will be true in 6-months time. Demand that your technology provider give
you a robust set of features and also ensure that they are building an open platform. Require that they invest the
time to understand your business and goals and that they are willing to innovate with you. That’s the definition of a
true partnership.
Additionally, take the time to understand a potential technology partner’s business model as well. Are they building
a “sales and service” model, or a technology licensing model? These may sound the same but have very different
implications when it comes time to investing in updates to their platform.
What is your view on exchanges? Do they or will they make sense for video advertising?
Right now the video advertising landscape for premium video is still in the relatively early stages. Most premium
content owners are able to manage to high levels of sell-through. In our platform, all of the sites we work with
support multi-party sales environments. These are not “true” exchanges but they are the beginnings of them.
Ultimately, the value proposition of an exchange is that it should decrease the friction of buying online video at
scale for advertisers, increase the ability for advertisers to target their ideal audience while driving more quality
demand and CPMs for content owners and publishers. We expect that exchanges will likely make sense for video
in the near future but we’re still managing through some of the Tier 1 challenges before this becomes a scaled
reality.
Follow Auditude (@auditude) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
January 28, 2010 – 2:29 am
158
Co-CEO Knopper Reviews FreeWheel’s Latest Financing
And Product Features
April 28, 2010 – 8:30 am
Video ad serving and management company, FreeWheel,
announced earlier this week that it had closed a $16.8 million
Series C financing round led by Steamboat Ventures. Read more.
Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel, discussed
the investment and the company's product line.
AdExchanger.com: What were you looking for in terms of a strategic investor in this round of funding and
please discuss why The Walt Disney Company affiliation is the right fit for FreeWheel?
DK: We designed the company and its products to help the largest media companies in the world make more
money from their video content – so, companies like Steamboat Ventures, an affiliate of The Walt Disney
Company, and Turner Broadcasting System are a logical fit – as both investors and either directly or indirectly, as
clients. We have a shared vision: to ensure that premium video content continues to be both consumed and
monetized.
How is "real-time" becoming an important feature in or attribute of FreeWheel's business?
This is a great question, and a big reason why companies like Turner and ESPN chose FreeWheel – their need to
monetize live events in addition to on-demand content. Managing sales rights, predicting inventory availability, and
ad decisioning is complex for on-demand content – for live events, it’s even harder. Many ad delivery systems can
deliver ads evenly over time; our system has the intelligence to manage ad commitments across a live event,
serving more heavily when the event is going on, and tapering off when the event is over. Again – for a company
like ESPN, this is invaluable.
Any plans on taking FreeWheel's monetization technology for online video ad serving to other digital
channels such as mobile or display? Digital marketing channels ideally shouldn't operate in a silo, no?
We're already serving ads into mobile, display, connected televisions, and the web. Our technology was built from
the beginning to go across platforms and devices; wherever the video goes, so goes our monetization technology.
Content isn’t just mobile – it’s portable – and for our clients, our ability to monetize that content is portable as well.
In regards to demand-side platforms, are publishers "outgunned" and is a sell-side platform necessary?
Do you see FreeWheel providing this type of solution?
We are not, nor do we intend to be in the media selling business. Often companies in our space choose to blend a
technology offering with a media selling offering – this has never been part of our strategy, nor will it be. Many of
our clients see this as a conflict of interest, and we do as well. In regards to publishers being outgunned, we’re
helping the largest media companies monetize their premium video content. We don’t see that going up for grabs
on an exchange anytime soon.
By John Ebbert
April 28, 2010 – 8:30 am
159
FreeWheel Creates PAVE, Discusses Necessity Of FullyIntegrated Video Solutions For Publishers
March 4, 2010 – 12:53 pm
Video monetization technology company, FreeWheel, announced
its new PAVE initiative today that it says will "lead to fully
integrated video solutions for major publishers." Read the release.
Doug Knopper, co-founder and co-CEO of FreeWheel, spoke to
AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: Why is PAVE necessary? How does this work with standardization efforts such as
The Pool or VAST?
DK: The PAVE Initiative is about formalizing the 70+ systems integrations FreeWheel has built with these
companies, and is about upholding industry standards for how technology works throughout the video ecosystem
(players, ad networks, creative technology, etc.). It allows our mutual clients to instantly plug into our
interconnected systems, reducing workload and operational friction. The IAB’s VAST standard is one of the criteria
for being included in the PAVE Initiative, as our technology is fully VAST compliant (see our certifications here).
The Pool is a research initiative led by VivaKi to help inform best practices based on user preferences.
How does PAVE benefit brand marketers? Does it speak to brand safety, for example?
The PAVE Initiative offers the greatest benefits to the clients that FreeWheel and our partners share in common.
However, the easier we make it for the largest media companies and publishers to offer creative, compelling video
products to advertisers, the more advertisers will be able to take advantage of telling branded video stories online
and on television. If it’s easier for publishers to sell more creative video products, it’s more compelling for
advertisers to buy – and the video spending pie grows for everyone.
What are your thoughts on an ad exchange for video? Given marketers predilection for buying audience,
cherry picking that audience through an exchange would be attractive, no?
There will always be room for volume-based audience buying – video ad exchanges are one example of how
advertisers and agencies can buy scaled audience segments. That said, brand experiences – the kind of brand
experiences that agencies and advertisers seek from television – likely won’t be bought and sold on an exchange
anytime soon.
By John Ebbert
March 4, 2010 – 12:53 pm
160
Innovid Choosing Pre-Roll To Grow Platform Says CEO
Netter
April 13, 2010 – 8:26 am
Zvika Netter is CEO of Innovid, an online video technology
platform.
AdExchanger.com: How has the company pivoted its
strategy since its inception? What have been some of the
external factors at work?
A year ago, we entered the market with an interactive video
platform capable of turning any video into an engaging
interactive experience. Towards the end of 2009, we decided to
focus all of our efforts behind our iRoll product - the interactive
pre-roll. The reason is SCALE. People buy & sell pre-roll in mass
scale more then any other video format. So we took it one step
further and added the much-needed "i" of interactivity to pre-roll.
What problem is Innovid solving?
We are solving two problems:
1. Advertisers using the web as distribution only platform
for their “TV ads."
2. Advertisers are paying for “internet” (interactive) media
while leveraging close to 0% of what it actually has to
offer.
Who do you see in your competitive set today? How is Innovid differentiating itself?
I would assume that rich media vendors are our “classical” competitors even though they do not offer a similar
solution to ours. Some ad networks offer interactivity in pre-rolls, while most of them are now also certified to run
iRoll based on their clients demand.
Our differentiation is Focus and Scale. We’re the leading/only tech platform vendor focusing 100% on interactive
video for advertisers and, more specifically now, – interactive pre-roll = iRoll. This allowed us to achieve massive
publisher integration in the US, including leading publishers/networks like NBC, MTV, Turner, Scripps, Tremor
Media and others.
No other vendor achieved this to-date – and it allows us to offer advertisers to run their iRoll campaigns with wide
reach across publishers and networks – something that the competition (vendors or networks can’t).
To support our growth, we developed a set of tools to enable professionals to create these experiences (see
screenshots here: http://www2.innovid.com/products.php?nodeID=39).
From your perspective, what's the hold up with moving brand advertising online? -And in online video
advertising, in particular?
Making the process of buying in large scale over multiple publishers while providing some added value over
television.
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Why choose to develop a pre-roll product as opposed to other video ad product formats?
It’s simple, people get it, people accept it. Buyers and sellers feel comfortable buying and selling it. In 2009, we
experimented with many other options, while achieving great WOW factor on a per project basis, there was no way
we could achieve scale with these niche products. We believe there’s a place for them and we’ll offer them when
relevant but can’t build a major company based on these other options.
Do you allow advertisers to append data and target audience, or is it placement/site based?
Yes we do, based on data we receive from the publisher, we’re able to change the creative on the fly – we call it
"iRoll dynamic." Ads can also be changed from day-to-day and also dynamically-based on brand data.
Is Innovid profitable? Will you raise a new round of financing anytime soon?
We’re scaling very fast and keep investing in our platform and strategic distribution partnerships (more to come
soon). While focusing 100% on execution of our business plan, we enjoy the support and excitement of our current
VC investors. When the right strategic/financial investor comes by – we’ll be open for dialogue.
A year from now, what milestones would you like to have seen Innovid accomplish?




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Massive reach – the Innovid platform integrated into most of the top publishers.
Having some iRoll features as part of almost any major brand pre-roll campaign
Few strategic (media) partners who resell our products to their clients and provide services using our tools
Expansion to Europe
Live iRoll campaigns on mobile and connected TV’s
Follow Innovid (@innovid) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger).
April 13, 2010 – 8:26 am
162
Video Ad Network ScanScout’s CEO Lau On Keys To
Successful Cost-Per-Engagement Model, Importance Of
VAST For Publishers And More
January 14, 2010 – 1:34 pm
Waikit Lau is President and Co-founder of ScanScout, an online video advertising network.
AdExchanger.com: How does ScanScout contextual
video advertising solution fit with today's audiencefocused media plans?
WL: ScanScout rolled out audience targeting about a
year and a half ago. Today, majority of ad buys are
audience targeted. We also offer contextual,
geographical, time of day and day of week targeting. We
rolled out contextual targeting first because if you think
about audience targeting, one of the signals of who an
audience is and what she is interested in, is reflected by
the videos the audience watches.
So, in order to do accurate audience targeting, one
needs to accurately classify the video the audience is
watching, to understand user interest and intent over
time. Otherwise, you get "garbage data in, garbage data
out". Essentially, the "understanding" of the video content
a user is watching over time is a core signal of audience
interests and targeting.
Our platform, which is different from other solutions in the
market today, does this automatically by deep indexing
the video the user is watching and the page the video is
on, using semantic, audio and visual analyses. Our
machine learning algorithms allows our system to
automatically without human intervention "understand" what a video is about and how it is correlated with other
concepts. For example, if a video simplistically has the term "Kobe Bryant" which is meaningless to a machine, our
platform knows that that term is related to "NBA", "Basketball", "LA Lakers", "Sports", etc. and not that related to
concepts like "Politics", etc. Also, because the system is able to correlate various concepts, the system also knows
when a video contains elements that are objectionable to a brand advertiser. This allows our system to be very
robust in our audience targeting accuracy, while ensuring brand protection for advertisers.
Tell us about your cost per engagement pricing. What was the tipping point for introducing this model?
Engagement-priced ad buys are a big part of our business now. When we introduced this about a year ago, the
goal was have a mechanism that is more accountable to advertisers and aligns everyone's interests. Our tipping
point was frankly feedback from ad buyers whom when we asked if a CPE model was something they would view
as being more helpful in their ad buy decisions and majority of them said yes.
Which type of video ad unit works best according to CPE (Cost Per Engagement)?
We have seen successes across various verticals. In terms of determinants of success for CPE, we find that user
targeting and ad creative make the most difference. On the ad creative front, since we build the creative for free for
the advertiser, we can use a lot of the learnings that we have to continually optimize the CPE ad. For example, we
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find that for Entertainment ads, there's a tendency for people to mouse over and engage with the actors in the
movie ad if they are on the ad creative.
When will video advertising be bought and sold through an exchange?
We think it will happen when the integration standards are there. But the standards are not widely adopted yet. We
think it'll be a question of when, not if.
What are the benefits of better format standards for video ads? How is ScanScout making it easier for
advertisers?
Better format standards allow for a more liquid market where an ad creative could be run in all publisher inventory.
Today, this might not be true depending on how the ad unit is built and how it is trafficked to the publisher. We are
fully standards compliant as we support VAST (Video Ad Serving Template) and VPAID (Video Player-Ad Interface
Definition). There are a few things that we do to make it easy for advertisers to buy video adverting from us. One is
we build the ad creative for our advertisers free, based on their directive and campaign goals. We take a very
consultative approach with agencies in order to customize the ads to their clients' goals. Second, we build the ad in
such a way that will be easy for users to engage and spend time with the ad. For example, one of our best
performing ad types is our Super Pre-roll where we have seen a 4x increase in user engagement when compared
to regular Pre-roll. Super Pre-roll is a Pre-roll where we can inject a layer of functionality onto the Pre-roll that
allows in-ad user engagement. Here's an example of a very successful campaign we ran for Unilever Vaseline.
Third, our rich reporting to advertisers shows what element of the ad creative attracted user attention and what
didn't. This allows them to also optimize in their future campaigns.
Any trends that you're seeing from clients today?
We are seeing increasing buys from the CPG segments over the past year. We think Auto will increase this year in
2010.
As a leader among video ad networks, how do you stay differentiated from your competitors?
We are different from our competitors by a few factors - We are the only video ad network in the market today with
both liquid pools of pre-roll and overlay ads. Most others just have pre-rolls. For publishers that frequency-cap prerolls, for example, 1 pre-roll for 3 videos watched, they can place a user-friendly overlay ad in the videos where
pre-rolls are not present. This creates a new revenue stream for the publisher, with the same amount of video
inventory they have. Publishers can also mix and match pre-rolls with overlay ads to achieve the optimal user
experience with monetization. Second, we are ultimately a video targeting and optimization company first and we
have very a robust targeting and optimization platform that has consistently outperformed others for advertisers.
Third, our platform yields deep insight into the "who", "how" and "why" of campaign results and target segments.
Fourth, we are the only network that supports the CPE model in-video stream. Finally, we have a large reach with
more than 1000 publishers, that are composed of many brand-name publishers such as NBC, Fox, Warner
Brothers, IAC, Comcast, Real Networks, Marvel, etc.
If you were a web publisher today, anything in particular that you would implement from a video
advertising point-of-view?
The first and foremost is to adopt IAB standards, as we think adoption of VAST is rising rapidly, so that if a
publisher has unsold inventory, it is easy for them to tap into any video ad networks. Another is to ensure that the
video player size is large enough (more than 320 pixels width) to accommodate both pre-roll and overlay ads, to
maximize monetization.
Follow ScanScout (@ScanScout) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
January 14, 2010 – 1:34 pm
164
CEO Morgan On Simulmedia’s Financing And Data-Driven
Television Insights
April 21, 2010 – 11:44 am
Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia, a technology company that
"delivers television viewership through data-driven program
promotion," discussed the company's latest round of financing
(see release) and recent insights.
AdExchanger.com: From your standpoint, can you expand
on why Time Warner is a strategic fit for Simulmedia? What
were you looking for in this new round of financing?
DM: We were looking for a great venture capitalist and board
member who knows the television industry and the "advanced TV" ecosystem. Rachel Lam, the Managing Director
of Time Warner Investments, fits that bill. She is a great venture capitalist and we're excited to have her involved
with the company. Further, having Time Warner involved with Simulmedia means that we can align our interests
with one of the world's most important creators and packagers of television content. We know that we can learn a
lot from them.
What's one key takeaway from the business today that you didn't see coming when you set out to create
Simulmedia?
We didn't realize how impactful television spots are when it comes to program promotion. We are seeing "response
rates" to program promos that blow away anything that I ever saw in my 15+ years in the online business.
In regards to the performance lift you're seeing of 50-350% from Simulmedia's products, do you think
Simulmedia's tune-in insights can be transferred online for use across other digital channels? If so,
when?
We suspect that the insights will be transferable to other digital channels, but pursuing other media channels at this
time is not a high priority for us. There is a tremendous amount of opportunity and a lot of work to be done in
optimizing linear television first.
By John Ebbert
April 21, 2010 – 11:44 am
165
New Simulmedia CRO Jon Werther Looks At Growing
Opportunity For Digital In TV
February 10, 2010 – 9:11 am
Jon Werther, a former AOL/Time Warner executive has joined
Dave Morgan's Simulmedia, which leverages digital to optimize
TV program promotion, as Chief Revenue Officer. View the
release on Simulmedia's website.
Werther discussed the new opportunity with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: In your estimation, where is digital in the
mindset of broadcast executives today? Have they caught
up?
JW: At Simulmedia, we think that one of the biggest unexploited opportunities today is to improve linear television
through the use of digital technology. I believe that broadcast executives understand that. There are many ways to
use data and technology to make television even more powerful and commercially valuable than it is today.
AdExchanger.com: Looking at your two stints at AOL and your role at Time Warner, can you identify some
key learnings from each of those roles that you will bring to Simulmedia?
JW: At Time Warner, we were very focused on creating win-win partnerships. I was very fortunate to be able to
work with some of the best deal people in the media industry and to craft transactions that ultimately drove
hundreds of millions of dollars in value to our company and its partners. Our approach at Simulmedia will be the
same, and I am excited to have the opportunity to participate in this next level of innovation in the television
industry.
By John Ebbert
February 10, 2010 – 9:11 am
166
Tremor Media CEO Glickman On Investment And
Opportunity Ahead In Video
April 30, 2010 – 6:53 pm
On Wednesday, Tremor Media rang the register to the tune of $40
million with lead investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund
taking charge and participation from DFJ and Triangle Peak
Partners among others. Read the release. And, read more from All
Things D's Peter Kafka.
Jason Glickman, CEO of Tremor Media, discussed the investment
and opportunities ahead for the company.
AdExchanger.com: What were you looking for in terms of a lead investor for this round? Is there a
strategic angle, for example?
JG: We are thrilled that DFJ Growth Fund is our lead investor because they understand the market better than
almost anyone else, have great experience in this space, have a strategic approach to video and I view them as a
great partner for this push.
Given your stated interest in possible acquisition with this new round of funding, what type of investment
opportunity would be a good fit potentially? -Go deep in technology, buy services overlays, etc.?
We are not publicly divulging specifics on our strategy, but we do see huge growth potential for digital video in
areas including mobile video, set-top boxes, over-the-top video, etc. and we see Tremor Media technology as
having the potential to become core to all of these technologies. We have a three-screen strategy on our roadmap.
We are also heavily investing in our core technology platform for advertisers
and publishers.
Regarding set-top boxes, when do you expect to see scale from this business opportunity? What will be
the key drivers - any timeline?
We expect the next 24 months to be an aggressive period of growth for set-top and over the top video advertising.
The key driver is user consumption and scale. Many of the largest hardware providers in that space are dedicating
significant money to promoting user adoption of these services.
Any plans for Tremor Media to address a sell-side platform solution for publishers which not only
manages video, graphical display, text ads, etc., but also identifies actionable data available to publishers
for both their guaranteed and non-guaranteed inventory?
This is already core to our offering today. Acudeo is a publisher-facing tool and we offer robust solutions for
publishers to maximize their revenue from any ad source or technology provider, not just Tremor Media. Data and
analytics is an important component of our offering. Our focus remains squarely on video formats in particular.
By John Ebbert
April 30, 2010 – 6:53 pm
167
Video Ad Network Tremor Media Announces Real-Time
Tech Upgrade, Partnership With Quantcast
February 26, 2010 – 9:53 am
Online video advertising network, Tremor Media, announced an
upgrade to its Acudeo technology yesterday which will offer
advertisers "an enhanced targeting solution that uses real-time
audience data to better package inventory across its network." In
addition, the company announced a partnership with online data
and audience measurement provider, Quantcast. Read the
release.
AdExchanger.com discussed the news and its implications with Jason Glickman, CEO of Tremor Media.
AdExchanger.com: How is Tremor Media making it easier for brand marketers - who are accustomed to TV,
reach and GRPs - to buy online video advertising?
JG: In order to have a GRP equivalent for online video, you have to be able to buy and deliver based on audience.
For the most part, digital is bought and delivered based on impressions, without any accountability for audience
delivery. Our targeting solution allows advertisers to plan, buy, and deliver based on audience delivery (just like
they do with TV). Also, because of our first-look targeting capability, we are able to do it at scale - which is another
requirement for making online video more like TV.
How does the Quantcast partnership work? Do you share revenue with Quantcast for the audience
targeting they provide to your clients?
Can't share contractual info regarding Quantcast. One important thing to note is that Acudeo can integrate with
several data sources, so Quantcast is one of several data partners we work with. We'll be announcing others in the
future.
Can you drill down on how the "real-time" offering and "real-time updates" mentioned in the release is
different than previous targeting methods?
Prior to launching real-time demographic targeting, we utilized comScore data to identify sites within our network
that index high for a particular audience segment, and we would create customized site lists around that audience.
With this approach, audience targeting was done at the CAMPAIGN and SITE level. With real-time targeting we
are able to identify a user's audience segment (no personally identifiable info) wherever and whenever they appear
on our network because we are able to retrieve segmentation data at the time the ad server request, which allows
us to choose the appropriately targeted ad based on the data that comes back. With this approach, audience
targeting is done at the USER and IMPRESSION level. This is made possible by the fact that our Acudeo publisher
technology is integrated into the player environment. Acudeo calls information from our 3rd party data sources so
that in real time our ad server knows which ad to serve to the user.
There are two important benefits of how we've enabled real-time targeting thru Acudeo - Precision & Scale:
1) Simultaneous real-time data look-up provides targeting precision.
Acudeo enables us to look up multiple data sources in real time to find the users’ most updated demographic
segment info. Simultaneous look up across multiple data sources enhances our user coverage on the network,
while real-time audience data ensures that we base our targeting on the most up-to-date audience data.
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2) Targeting users on the first impression provides scale.
Tremor Media’s Acudeo flash component is integrated into the publishers’ players, which gives us ability to
segment audiences and serve relevant ads on the first impression on the network. Other XML based networks
typically identify the user, insert a targeting cookie on the first visit, and re-target the users from the second visit
which compromises scale.
By John Ebbert
February 26, 2010 – 9:53 am
169
Search Marketing
PPC Search Platform Provider, Acquisio, Looking To
Integrate Display And Social
March 2, 2010 – 12:05 am
Late last week, Acquisio announced that it was integrating DART
into its paid search platform Though DART is used for paid search,
display advertising may be a logical next step for a platform such
as Acquisio's. Read the release.
Martin Le Sauteur, CEO of Acquisio, discussed the implications of
the DART integration.
AdExchanger.com: Why integrate DART into your search platform?
MLS: Acquisio's clients are agencies and all agencies live in a world where each new client brings its own set of
tracking systems. That's why agencies can't afford to be dedicated to just one tracking solution. When it comes to
analytics, for example, most agencies have a mix of clients who use Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalyst,
WebTrends or Coremetrics.
When it comes to third party ad servers, the same is true, and their clients will use a mix of them. In this area,
DoubleClick DFA is the gold standard. Most of our clients currently use DART to track results from display
advertising, but many also use DART to track paid search results. This meant they had to use DART to traffick all
their keywords, and each time a change was required, they had to go back to DART, get the trafficking sheet and
push it into Acquisio. It was just extremely time consuming and agencies were concerned about losing historical
data and having to re-tag all of their clients' websites.
Integrating DoubleClick and Acquisio therefore made sense and dozens of our clients were asking for the
integration. Now, agencies can leverage the power of their DART tracking data within the Acquisio SEARCH
application, eliminating the need to transfer files, manually encode URLs, or sync data.
As we like to say, our customers drive our road map, and this has been in the works for some time now. We're glad
it's finally available.
How is Acquisio approaching effective cross-channel attribution? Is it all about the click, for example?
Today, we're a platform to manage paid search campaigns, which means we only track clicks. However we are
developing applications and partnerships beyond paid search. Online marketing is changing, and search is no
longer the only effective method to get leads. Display advertising and social advertising are both key elements of
the performance media mix, and we will be expanding our offering beyond paid search and into display and social
ads in the near future. This means we'll be in a position to support campaign management and reporting based on
much more than just clicks, but also using metrics specific to these channels, such as exposure to ads and more.
Third party ad servers are the key to all this, and we're going to continue to connect with the industry's leading
solutions to offer our clients the flexibility they need to most effectively serve their clients.
As far as attribution goes, we plan to let our clients choose between the model their ad server provides, or to
override it and score the importance of various events like clicks and ad views according to their view of their
relative importance. We'll see in time if designing cross-channel attribution algorithms could help, but to be honest
at the moment we just don't know if that's the case. I don't think anyone truly does either.
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Can you share some milestones you'd like to see with your platform a year from now given the DART
integration?
We're excited about getting into display and social advertising, so we expect to have made some significant
progress within the next 12 months. Ultimately, the idea is to release a new platform that helps our clients buy and
manage ads across all these channels in a seamless manner, and to bring them all the tools they need to
automate and optimize the bidding process, the platform to deliver cross-channel client reporting, and the rest of
the tools agencies need to excel at performance marketing. This means developing API connections to the
dominant ad exchanges and networks, as well as to Facebook ads, and who knows, maybe even "Twitter Ads" or
whatever they end up releasing. We'll integrate these based on client demand and on availability.
March 2, 2010 – 12:05 am
171
The Clickable Goal: “The Apple of Online Advertising” For
Search And Social Says CEO Kidder
April 26, 2010 – 12:05 am
David S. Kidder is co-founder and CEO of Clickable, a search
networks and social advertising buying platform.
AdExchanger.com: What problem is Clickable solving today
overall?
DSK: Our goal at Clickable is to help businesses survive and thrive
by simplifying online advertising success. We began in 2007 with
Clickable Pro, our flagship product. Clickable Pro removed the
complexity that prevented many marketers from expanding into
search networks besides Google AdWords by introducing a simple
interface that marketers could you use to manage all of their search
marketing campaigns. Today, we are introducing that same
simplicity to new online channels, beginning with Facebook.
Why does it make sense to add social targeting through Facebook now?
Clickable already makes it simple to advertise across search networks, so the next step for us was to move into a
new online channel. Because it is the largest social media network in the world, Facebook was the logical choice.
The numbers are very exciting: Facebook has over 400 million users, and last month its traffic exceeded Google’s
for the first time ever. Most importantly, Facebook introduces a new way to advertise that complements search
marketing. Using extensive demographic targeting criteria, advertisers on Facebook can get out ahead of their
customers and create demand that they will later capture with their search campaigns. Marketers can also use
Facebook to promote their brands and drive direct sales. However, ads on Facebook need to be created one-byone, and there’s no tools within Facebook to allow marketers to track their social media performance alongside
search. Clickable now solves both of those problems.
Why is "real-time" important to Clickable?
Advertisers need to move as quickly as their markets, and no market moves more quickly than the online market.
The great opportunity that online advertising presents is the ability to connect with the right customer, in the right
place and at the right time. With search and social advertising, marketers can reach their potential customers at
exactly the moment when they’re most receptive to an offer. But, the speed with which things change online means
that “the right place and the right time” are moving targets. Clickable works in “real time” to assure that advertisers
are always ahead of their customers, rather than lagging behind.
What might a typical use case look like for the marketer who uses Clickable to access Facebook? Is it any
different than using Facebook's own ad targeting platform?
Users with existing Facebook accounts can work with Clickable in two different ways. Those who want to selfmanage can use the Facebook Bulk Upload tool in Clickable Pro. It’s a spreadsheet-based tool that allows users to
create, modify and delete Facebook ads in bulk. (On Facebook’s platform, ads have to be created one-by-one,
which has been a huge friction point for advertisers looking to make a significant investment in social media ads.)
Once their ads are live, they can track performance alongside search with Clickable Conversion Tracking
(Facebook does not have its own conversion tracking tool) and build reports that display social media results
alongside search.
We also give marketers the option of letting us manage social marketing for them with Clickable Assist, our full-
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service solution. Our Account Managers already manage search for hundreds of clients; we’re excited to add
social media to the mix.
Is Clickable a demand-side platform? What's your view on DSPs?
Yes: Clickable is a demand-side platform because online marketing is a demand-side business. With traditional
marketing channels, the scarcity of inventory meant that suppliers ― of television and radio commercial time, print
advertising space or billboard real estate ― were the drivers of the advertising business. Online marketing
produces billions of impressions every day. There is no scarcity of inventory―in fact, inventory is essentially
unlimited. Therefore, the business is driven by marketers themselves. Our success depends on theirs.
Any plans for the Clickable platform to allow marketers to append data when they're buying placements in
Facebook? Will retargeting a marketer's own users be possible, for example?
Yes, we have plans to allow advertisers to append data to existing social, as well as search, data.
Advertising on Facebook is relatively new. As the API evolves, we are looking to add data that will improve the
effectiveness of pay-per-click Facebook ads. Moreover, we are taking a very active role as Facebook API partners.
Retargeting is not possible today, but we are presenting a plan to Facebook regarding tools that will allow
advertisers to append valuable data and improve their results across the network.
Is there an interaction that occurs between search and social marketing? Will Clickable be showing this to
the marketer through some sort of attribution modeling and reporting?
Absolutely: search and social marketing are complimentary channels for communicating with customers online.
Search marketing most often targets customers who are looking for a solution to a very specific problem. Every
time they conduct a search, they are asking a question. The job of the search marketer is to answer that
question―and convert users to their answer.
With social media marketing, advertisers can create demand by targeting “personas.” Search provides some
rudimentary demographic targeting tools (primarily location-based). Social, on the other hand, introduces a huge
wealth of targeting data: everything from gender and age to occupation, hobbies and relationship status. Defining a
persona with these tools is simply a way of defining a target market, albeit with extreme precision. Once that
market is defined, and advertiser can use social media advertising to promote their brands and their products to
hundreds of millions of potential customers.
Clickable has two tools that help advertisers track these two channels alongside one another. The first is Clickable
Conversion Tracking, which allows advertisers to track performance across search networks and Facebook with
single tag on their Web sites. And our reporting tools allow advertisers to analyze that performance with standard
or customized and white-labeled reports. The entire funnel is transparent, and it’s all in one place.
After search and social, what's the next low hanging fruit of targeting environments?
Our current plan is to continue our expansion into existing search and social networks, including Ask.com and
MySpace. As we make it simpler and simpler to expand to new channels, marketers have fewer reasons not to
advertise everywhere possible. Online, even a 2 percent market share represents millions of impressions.
Discuss the company's funding to-date. Are you profitable today? And can you envision seeking another
round?
In December 2007, Clickable completed its Series A round of investment, led by Union Square Ventures and First
Mark Capital (some of Facebook and Twitter’s original backers). We raised $6 million in that round, and an
additional $14.5 million in a Series B round completed in July 2008. (Our Series B round was led by individual
investors, including Peter Thiel, Managing Partner of The Founders Fund and Co-founder of PayPal; and Jonathan
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F. Miller, Chief Digital Officer, Chairman of Digital Media Group and Chief Executive of Digital Media Group, News
Corp.)
Our plan is to achieve profitability in Q3 of this year. Currently, we do not envision seeking an additional round of
investment.
A year from now, what milestones would you like Clickable to have accomplished?
The gold standard for simplicity is set by Apple, and it is our goal to be the Apple of online advertising―both
search and social.
We’re also going to use the next year to make significant strides with Clickable Platform, our white label partner
solution. Clickable Platform empowers our partners to deploy online advertising to thousands of local clients. In the
next twelve months, 5000 active and delighted customers will manage over $1 billion of ad spend on Clickable
Platform. And to support them, our team will grow to 250 people worldwide.
Follow David S. Kidder (@davidkidder), Clickable (@clickable) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger.com) on
Twitter.com.
April 26, 2010 – 12:05 am
174
Efficient Frontier Announces Its Demand-Side Platform;
Adds Display Media Buying Capabilities To Its Search
Platform
Email This Post
April 27, 2010 – 5:18 pm
Efficient Frontier announced that it was getting in the demand-side
platform game by adding a display media buying component to its
paid search buying platform. According to the release, "The new
display offering includes real-time bidding capabilities, which is
dynamic bidding at the impression level, as well as a proven
portfolio approach to optimization." Read more.
Justin Merickel is the VP of Marketing and New Product
Development at Efficient Frontier and discussed the company's new search and display initiatives.
AdExchanger.com: Initially, where do you see the sweet spot for offering cross-platform (display and
search) targeting? Any verticals in particular?
JM: Our focus is on performance marketers who are using search and display to garner a measurable ROI. Since
launch we have been focused on working with our client base where we have significant concentrations in finance,
education, autos, travel, and retail. We are now working with a few companies that are not existing search clients
who today only leverage the display aspects of our platform. These clients still align with our performance
orientation.
How big is the display ad education challenge for EF in relation to its seach marketing clientele? Any
methodology you can share for educating the search masses?
There is some education on the exchanges and the unique characteristics of display optimization. Impression
characteristics like frequency and ad-size are not really part of the optimization equation in search marketing. That
being said, search clients are very comfortable with auction marketplaces and optimizing to ROI. In fact, there is a
trend at many clients where the search team is absorbing ownership for the performance side of display.
Of existing display and search clients, how does monthly spend breakout between display and search on
average per client? How do you expect this to evolve? 50/50 someday?
The break-out between search and display is variable depending on the type of client, target audience, and scope
of campaign. That being said, today the monthly break-out in spend in our platform for clients using us for both
search and display is around 90% search, 10% display. We do see this spend ratio scaling rapidly in favor of
display as the exchange market matures.
Can you talk about the attribution capabilities of the EF display/search platform? For example, how do
you handle viewthroughs in both display -and even search?
In managing and optimizing both search and display we capture a very robust set of ad interaction data.
Additionally, our clients use our tags to capture and deliver to us the post-click and post-view data that is critical to
optimization. As a result of this extensive data capture, we have incredibly detailed information about campaign
performance that is seamlessly connected for analysis in our platform.
Today, our default attribution setting is last click. We give clients the flexibility to define a view through credit in the
absence of a last click. And, of course, we provide the ability to apply a unique look-back window for click and view
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conversions. On the roadmap is a more flexible, multi-stage attribution credit that can assign credit to multiple ad
interactions that precede a conversion.
One interesting trend is that our clients find so much value in the unified campaign analysis that we are beginning
to leverage our ad-serving for premium display buys outside of the exchange. In serving premium campaigns, our
attribution spans 100% of their display and search buys. While the Efficient Frontier technology will only optimize
biddable display, our clients are leveraging the analysis to inform premium buying with a deeper understanding of
how search and display interact.
By John Ebbert
April 27, 2010 – 5:18 pm
176
Trada Growing A Marketplace For Expertise In PPC
Marketing Says CEO Robertson
April 22, 2010 – 9:57 am
Niel Robertson is Founder and CEO of Trada, a PPC marketing
campaign marketplace.
AdExchanger.com: What problem is Trada solving?
NR: Fundamentally, the problem that Trada is solving is that paid
search has become a complex and time-consuming task to do well.
For small- and medium-sized businesses (spending between
$1,000 and $50,000/mo on paid search) this is more challenging,
as they lack the expertise to constantly optimize their paid search
campaigns. Companies doing paid search must grapple with
thousands of keywords, hundreds of ads, constantly changing bid
prices, organization of their campaign to maximize Google Quality
Score, which ad networks to run on (and the fact they will all cost
different prices for the same keywords), tracking, CPA calculations,
etc.
Trada solves this problem not with technology but with the biggest
gap: expertise. And rather than trying to match one PPC expert to
a campaign, we create a marketplace and collaborative system
where multiple PPC experts (the average is 25) work on a
campaign together. The benefit of this is both the diversity of
thinking of these experts as well as their constant optimization.
How defensible is your model? Could it easily be replicated?
We have patented many aspects of our marketplace (including
future types of advertising we will go into). When we started we
thought we could whip the system together in a few months. As it turns out it’s much more complicated to get tens
of people to work together on a paid search campaign well and to manage the quality of the crowd. One of the
problems in paid search is that there is no common definition of expertise. Different campaigns require different
strategies. This is a constant process of development, analysis and refinement. We did not launch the company for
18 months (even though we built our first version of the market in 2 months) because we wanted to wait until we
had a maturity level around all of these things that we thought was conducive to the best outcomes possible for
any advertiser we encountered.
Can you provide a use case of a typical campaign?
We have many different campaigns from software lead generation to retail to auto dealerships. A typical campaign
for Trada spends between 3,000 and 15,000 a month (we have a few smaller and larger campaigns as well). A
great use case is a niche retail site, say a company selling satellite radios and parts online. They are very focused
on the cost per sale (also known as CPA) from paid search. To build an effective campaign for this type of
customer you need to use lots of long-tail keywords (more specific terms that might include brands or product part
numbers) instead of general terms ( e.g. satellite radios). In addition, many of the ads need to be created specific
to each product or SKU, and the ads need to be linked to the part of the website related to the product. This is
incredibly time consuming to do as an individual. Splitting up the work between 25 people makes this much more
palatable. An average campaign in Trada has 6,500 keywords, 25 experts working on it and more than 110 ads.
Some campaigns have up to 40,000 keywords and more than 50 optimizers. It can depend on the complexity of
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the site (how many products they sell) and the budget they have allocated for paid search. A typical customer like
this sees increased volume of sales and decreased CPA costs due to the cheaper, long-tail keywords our
optimizers use.
What trends are you seeing among your clients? Any momentum with agencies using your product?
We are seeing larger budgets come into the system since our launch. Some of this is purely due to the word-ofmouth about Trada’s new approach to paid search. Some of this is due to advertisers simply spending too much
time or too much money and not getting results. They recognize they have to do paid search but have not had
many alternatives until Trada.
As for agencies, we’ve seen great interest from them. An agency can be anything from two freelancers working
together up to the top 10 agencies. In both cases, they struggle with the same challenges of paid search: it’s time
consuming to do well. When you have limited resources and many customers to serve this can be a challenge in
PPC. There is great commoditization going on with PPC services and agency margins for this work are being
squeezed (as opposed to something like SEO work which has much higher margins). Trada allows these agencies
to sit in the control seat with their customers but leverage Trada’s marketplace of experts to build comprehensive
campaigns. The agency effectively becomes the manager and not the doer. which our feedback shows they like.
How does the revenue model work for Trada and the search marketer participants?
Advertisers pay Trada a fixed price per click and/or a fixed price per sale (or lead or registration). In the price-perclick model, this sets the maximum price an optimizer working on their campaign can bid on keywords. The
optimizer is incented to find keywords that work for less than that price, and they receive the difference. The
advertiser can specify multiple “tiers” of prices if they want to allow more expensive keywords to be bid on, and
they can reduce the payment in each tier to not create greater incentive to bid on expensive keywords. In the priceper-sale model, an advertiser tells Trada what an acceptable cost is per sale. The optimizer (PPC expert) is then
tasked with spending less than that amount on paid search spend (clicks), keeping whatever is remaining after the
sale. If an advertiser specifies $10 as their acceptable cost and an optimizer spends $8.50 on clicks to get the sale
by good optimization, they make the remaining $1.50. Trada, in all cases, takes 25% of the payment to the
optimizer. This fundamentally creates a model where everyone in the market is working on a pay-for-performance
system. As a last note, advertisers are not locked into their price. As they get more data from clicks and sales they
can lower their price, add a new tier or even increase their price to get more volume. In the end, we have created a
market effective for everyone.
Given the advertiser's ability to change CPA or CPC goals, for example, why isn't this a race to the bottom
in terms of pricing?
Paid search is a constant trade off of cost and volume. Independent of how you do paid search (through Trada or
otherwise) you simply can’t keep reducing your CPA to 0 as at some point you’ll simply get no clicks and thus no
sales. The price you pay for a keyword is directly correlated to the position you get on Google or Yahoo’s ad strip.
The higher the price, the higher the position. If you keep reducing your price in Trada, you’ll limit the positions your
optimizers can obtain for their keywords, and thus the volume of clicks and conversions you get. We find in Trada
that advertisers have not raced to the bottom primarily for this reason. Also – there is an implicit need for the
optimizers to have some margin to work with. If the margin is taken away, their incentive is gone. In the end,
advertisers understand that getting an average CPC of 50 cents on Trada and giving up a few cents per click to the
optimizer makes much more sense than doing it themselves and getting a $2 CPC by paying Google directly with
no margin.
What feedback are you getting from search marketers who are enabling your marketplace? Can they make
a living from just Trada?
The number one comment we get is from freelancers who spend a lot of their time finding and managing clients
and not being able to focus on the actual activity of paid search. Trada has already found the clients, handles the
reporting and support, and they get to just focus on paid search, which is what they like to do. I think this will be a
big growth segment for us. Right now, we have top optimizers making in the low $1,000’s a month, but as the
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market grows and our software becomes more sophisticated we expect this number to scale quickly. I expect by
the end of the year, we’ll have a number of optimizers who make a full-time living comparable to their previous
salaries by only working in Trada.
Is it possible to port Trada's marketplace model to online display advertising (or other channels)? What
might be the challenges here?
Many of our direct advertisers and agencies frequently ask us this. We have found there is a commonality between
all forms of performance-based marketing online: complexity, scale and the need for constant price optimization. In
paid search, the complexity comes from the thousands or tens of thousands of keywords that can be used and the
process of matching ads to them, bidding correctly and optimizing against results (like conversion rates). In
display, mobile and content, the complexity comes in another form: placements. To get the most out of a Google
AdSense campaign, experts need to hand manage placements (domains or URLs they want their ads to appear
on) and the right price for each placement. Fundamentally, we believe our business can extend into other forms of
advertising (not to mention other paid search networks beyond the big 3). We’re very focused right now on building
the best platform for collaboration, reporting and incentive systems for experts. We think this is the right strategy
now to enable us to successfully expand the business when we want.
Discuss your financing to date and whether you anticipate future needs around funding.
We have raised a total of $2.2 million to date. We have raised this in two rounds and from one venture capitalist
firm, Foundry Group, and some very relevant angel investors: Stuart Larkins and Jamie Crouthamel (Performics),
Dan Murray (super affiliate), Alan Warms (ex GM of Yahoo! News), Carlos Cashman (CourseAdvisor.com) and
Robert Wolfe (Moosejaw.com). We have stayed extremely frugal and focused the business on self-sustainability.
We’re getting closer to that by the day. We may choose to accelerate into the curve or grow organically – that
decision has not been made yet. Our existing investors have committed to any future funding needs we may have,
so we can delay that decision for a while.
How scalable and manual is the Trada marketplace model? How many employees is your company today and if you were to grow significantly, would you need to add a lot of headcount?
The beauty of market models is once you have the model down (and a lot of the plumbing to automate it and make
it self-managing) you can scale the business incredibly. eBay and Match.com are good examples of these types of
companies. We’re starting to see the benefits of that already. We have a small team (<20 people) but expect to
grow quite a bit. The growth will be primarily from revenue-generating head count such as telesales and business
development resources. We can speed up or slow down depending on the growth we’re seeing.
A year from now, what milestones would you like to see Trada have achieved?
On the feature front, I want us to have refined our marketplace to a maturity that a true PPC expert can quickly
come to Trada, find a campaign to work on, and be successful. Meaning that they can recreate their previous
successes easily, and we provide them the tools to do so. On the advertiser side, we want to continuously deliver
on our credo – Ridiculously Easy. Measurably Better. Powered By People. With a broad set of advertisers,
optimizers and agencies, we never have a lack of items to be better at to accomplish this goal. In terms of the
market, I want Trada to be a sizable marketplace for all participants. Advertisers should have a diversity and scale
of PPC experts that allow them to get attention from a large set of relevant optimizers. Conversely, optimizers
should have enough advertisers to select from, so they can make a living off of Trada. We’ve got good scale today
already, but I’d love to see us get to an order of magnitude more on both sides (which is about the pace we’re
growing at). From a public perception perspective, I want Trada and our model to be respected as the single best
way to build a paid search campaign if you simply can’t afford to spend the time or money doing it yourself. If we
even get half of that right then I think we will have had an amazing year!
Follow Trada (@trada) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 22, 2010 – 9:57 am
179
Digital Out-Of-Home
Argo Digital Solutions CEO Kates Discusses Digital-OutOf-Home Audience Buying And Planning With rVue 2.0
Email This Post
March 9, 2010 – 3:40 pm
Argo Digital Solutions recently released rev. 2 of its rVue platform which enables the buying and selling of digitalout-of-home media through rVue's exchange.
Argo Digital Solutions' Jason Kates discussed the rVue 2.0 and the digital-out-of-home market.
AdExchanger.com: Since you last spoke with AdExchanger.com, you've come out with a new rev of rVue,
your digital-out-of-home exchange. Please explain why you describe rVue 2.0 as "social".
JK: rVue has created a transparent marketplace that allows digital out of home networks, industry professionals
and advertisers to communicate openly via the platform. When you look at the network profile page or the
dashboard, you'll see that many popular components of social media have been built into the 2.0 version of rVue to
promote communication, such as status bars, the ability to "follow", photo uploads, rss feeds, search engines, etc.
rVue embraces transparency and promotes communication in an effort to accelerate the industry's visibility as a
valuable media.
How are the datasets gathered for the platforms targeting capabilities? How do you verify the data?
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Each of the networks within the marketplace are empowered create a profile, upload and maintain their own data.
The data is imported on a location by location basis to allow for addressability and targeting in many different
ways; geo, demo, category, venue etc. The data is maintained and kept current by the networks. Networks within
the system are encouraged to upload third-party verification, white papers, and more when available.
Who are your key clients? Are DOOH agencies from big holding companies, independent agencies or?
There are three basic categories of users within the rVue marketplace.



First, we have over 50 networks that vary in size from just a few screens (there is no minimum
requirement) to larger networks with tens of thousands of screens.
Secondly, we are working with advertisers, agencies and media buying groups that range from the largest
agency groups in the world at the highest level down to the local agency with only a few employees and a
small media budget.
Our third and newest user of the rVue ad exchange is what we call "everyone else." As we have launched
the 2.0 version of the exchange, we have opened it to those DOOH industry professionals - whether is is
integrators, writers, investors or just those with an interest in the media - to become part of the platform.
With just a glimpse of the dashboard within the platform, they can get a "real time" snapshot of what is
going on in the industry in just a few seconds.
Is there a danger that agencies could go around you and buy directly from the DOOH networks that are
plugged into rVue?
With this kind of transparency, there is always some risk. However, we have several key components in our favor.
Media buyers are busy, their time is precious and buying digital out of home media is cumbersome with a
traditional approach. If we want them to embrace digital out of home as a one of their 'go to' medias, we need to
make it EASY for them and allow them to maintain the control they are used to. Within rVue, we've provided them
with a tool that allows them to make a DOOH media plan within minutes (instead of days or hours), stay in control
and not be charged outrageous fees for the media or the transaction.
What separates rVue is that it is an ad exchange rather than an ad network. This is a simple, but key differentiating
factor. The rVue platform provides a marketplace for the DOOH industry by allowing the advertisers and networks
to stay empowered. We don't aggregate the network's inventory, we offer a no to low cost to entry and we don't
commoditize the media. Agencies get instant gratification when they can draft a plan within a few minutes.
I enjoy showing the rVue ad exchange and media planner to folks who are previewing it for the first time because
the results are always the same. When the light bulb goes on and they understand the key differences between
rVue and ad networks or aggregators, they immediately light up and want to adopt it as part of their marketing
efforts or media planning. They also gain further the confidence in knowng that we've been around for a while, are
on our 2.0 version and have maintained an excellent reputation for our service and technology.
By John Ebbert
March 9, 2010 – 3:40 pm
181
Lead Generation
Inuvo CEO Howe Reviews $4.2 Million Public Offering And
Lead Generation Opportunity
January 21, 2010 – 7:26 am
Publicly-traded Inuvo announced that it has raised $4.2 million in a
public offering with funds to be used for ongoing expansion of its ad
platform for the lead gen space. Read the release.
Rich Howe, CEO of Inuvo, discussed the new funds and the evolution
of Inuvo with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: How does raising funds in the public
markets present special challenges?
RH: For Inuvo™, three questions drove our strategy:
1. Could we afford to pay the fees and take the dilution
associated with using an outside party to manage the
transaction?
2. Could we convince new shareholders that the new strategy
and team were worth the risk?
3. Could we fully subscribe the offering at market?
For our company, at this point in the evolution of the business, we were successful in directly convincing
shareholders to invest in the company at the existing market price of the stock. The transaction was
oversubscribed and as a result, the best interests of shareholders were realized. The stock has risen 60%
subsequent to the closing. It was certainly a challenge to execute on all the fronts simultaneously and the
procedural requirements for public companies most certainly do not make the process any easier.
AdExchanger.com: What is the key market that the ad platform serves? What does your competitive set
look like?
RH: The company is targeting advertisers interested in performance-based advertising, where the advertiser is
willing to pay for a generated action online, such as a sale, a click or a lead. With top-notch advertisers, we
simultaneously target quality publishers who are looking to monetize online efforts and receive the highest possible
payout.
We offer customers three principle advantages over our competition. First, since we are a platform and not a
network, we have eliminated the traditional layers in the value chain between advertisers and publishers and as a
result, are able to offer the platform services at competitive rates relative to our competition. Second, the Inuvo
Platform provides advertisers with full transparency and control over their advertising campaigns, right down to
individual publishers and the lead transactions they generate. Finally, we allow advertisers to integrate the Inuvo
Platform with their existing lead or sales management systems. In so doing, manual reporting and consolidation
activity that plagues existing affiliate management systems is mitigated.
AdExchanger.com: Inuvo has been around for a while now. Can you discuss the evolution of the
company?
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RH: The original company strategy was to roll up Internet businesses and between 2005 and 2008 that’s exactly
what happened. The company was called Think Partnership back then. Integrating and operating multiple
businesses brought together in this fashion is complex with a number of unique people, process, and
organizational challenges. In May of 2008, the Board of Directors decided to bring in new management with proven
experience in the integration of businesses, Internet advertising and a detailed knowledge of behavioral targeting
technologies. December 2008 set a true new beginning in motion for the company when I was brought on as Chief
Executive Officer. Since my arrival, the entire management team and board has been reconstituted with executives
from the advertising, analytics, media and marketing services industries. The company’s new mission is to become
a leading provider of online advertising services powered by data and analytics, and with new management in
place from companies such as Acxiom® and FICO™, the investment community, as evidenced by the recent
equity offering being fully subscribed, appears to concur. 2009 was a rebuilding year for the company, a time to
correct past mistakes, focus on the parts of the business with greatest promise and position for 2010 and beyond.
The rebranding of the company to Inuvo, the word itself a combination of the words “innovate” and “nouveau”, was
management’s way to tell the markets that a new and innovative company was back in the game.
AdExchanger.com: So, in a nutshell, what problem is Inuvo solving?
RH: Advertisers want high-quality leads and/or sales, publishers want to monetize the traffic that comes to their
sites. Inuvo can help both constituents improve their current returns.
By John Ebbert
January 21, 2010 – 7:26 am
183
Mobile
Flurry CEO Khalaf On New Funds And Current Mobile Ad
Network Performance
January 12, 2010 – 8:16 am
Flurry, a provider of mobile analytics and mobile ad network
solutions, announced its latest round of funding - $7 million which included InterWest Partners and existing investors
Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Union Square Ventures, First Round
Capital and Draper Richards. Read the release.
AdExchanger.com spoke with Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf about
the recent raise and the company's plans.
AdExchanger.com: What was your experience during the
fundraising process? The funding climate appears seems
to be red hot for mobile.
SK: The climate is definitely improving, especially in mobile. In addition to our own experience, we receive inquiries
from VCs to check on the performance of mobile applications in specific categories. The market especially started
to heat up in the September timeframe.
AdExchanger.com: With AppCircle it would seem that Flurry is getting in the mobile ad network business
and moving beyond just analytics. Fair statement?
SK: Our plan is to offer a variety of monetization services based on our core analytics service. As an example,
AppCircle is a direct response, CPI (Cost Per Install) and CPS (Cost per Sale) network. Going forward, we will
offer more services aimed at increasing revenue for app developers, and we will work with many online ad
networks, not just mobile ones, to achieve that.
AdExchanger.com: Considering AppCircle is in private beta, can you share any early results you're seeing
in terms of ROI for developers?
SK: Here's some sample data for you:
1. Click-Through Rates range from 2.3% to 8%. Average on AppCircle is 4.8%. CTRs
average better than traditional brand (CPM) based networks.
2. CPIs are at about 50 cents for free apps and 30% of price of the applications if the
application is not free.
3. Brand Matters: CTRs and closure rates (sales all the way through the App Store) are 3x
to 4x better for applications with a known brand (e.g., EA, Gameloft, and Disney) than
others.
4. Price Sensitivity Analysis: There appears to be little price sensitivity between $2.99 and
$4.99. CTRs and Closure rates are roughly the same.
Please note that this data is from a sample of approximately 30 publishers, 8 million impressions and 120 different
apps recommended within our system.
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By John Ebbert
January 12, 2010 – 8:16 am
185
Mobile Ad Network Jumptap Discusses The iPad
Advertising Opportunity
January 28, 2010 – 5:39 pm
Mobile ad network Jumptap announced targeting for the new
Apple tablet computer, iPad, yesterday. Read the release.
AdExchanger.com discussed the new iPad and the advertising
opportunity enabled by it with Jumptap CMO Paran Johar.
AdExchanger.com: What makes the Apple iPad (or tablet)
a "mobile" opportunity? For Jumptap, what are the key
differences of the iPad that makes it mobile versus the
online experience of a laptop PC's browser?
PJ: Two key components. The first mobile opportunity is
extending the reach of existing iPhone mobile applications to a
new iPad platform. Our network of application developers, who
are both publishers and advertisers with us, will have an
immediate opportunity without making any technical changes.
But to fully take advantage of the new platform, new ad units
will need to be deployed by both publishers and advertisers for
applications that are customized to the new factor of the iPad. The second mobile opportunity is for brand
advertisers that are seeking consumers that are on-the-go. The ultra-thin, sleek design makes iPad a highly
portable device, meaning consumers will have this in the car, on the plane, in the coffee shop, and in their
handbag. For years, mobile advertising experts have built business practices for how to take advantage of
mobile's unique aspects, like geo-targeting and location based services such as couponing. These will extend
onto this new platform.
AdExchanger.com: What is the potential impact of the iPad on digital advertising? A year from now, any
guess as to what share the iPad will have of total mobile advertising spend?
PJ: iPad's impact extends beyond simply mobile to impact digital and traditional advertising. Its personal media
services will further fragment audiences that previously shared experiences in front of the television and further pull
consumers into digital, away from traditional media such as newspapers or magazines. For digital advertisers,
both PC and mobile, it provides opportunities for even more interactive brand experiences.
In terms of share of iPad vs total mobile ad spending in 12 months, an overly optimistic ratio would be looking at
projected iPad to iPhone sales. If there are 10 million iPads (as projected) then compared to 75 million iPhones
(and iPod Touches) today, then the largest scenario would be approximately a 10-15% share, which would
completely ignore Android, iPhone growth, and the numerous other mobile devices. Given those other
considerations, while still keeping in mind Apple's history of exceeding expectations in mobile, 5% is not
unreasonable.
AdExchanger.com: Is the mobile channel's "real money" in building and having users download branded
apps? Or, is it in serving display ads in mobile apps/the mobile browser?
PJ: Apps are certainly key in mobile today, primarily because of current browser capabilities including iPad's lack
of Adobe Flash support. But long-term, look at the PC equivalent. How many "apps" have you downloaded for
your PC lately? Probably many fewer, if any. That's because the PC browser provides interactive user interface
capabilities that can only be served using apps today in mobile and on the iPad. Increases in mobile network
bandwidth will also increase browser based application adoption by making sophisticated webpages more
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responsive.
By John Ebbert
January 28, 2010 – 5:39 pm
187
Mobclix’ Subramanian Looks At Heartbeat Acquisition And
Mobile Ad Performance
March 3, 2010 – 12:04 am
Mobile ad exchange, Mobclix, announced the acquisition of mobile analytics
firm, Heartbeat, on Monday. (Read more.) Also, last week, Mobclix released
results of "The Mobclix Challenge," a performance comparison between
MobClix and Google-owned mobile ad network, AdMob. See it here.
Krishna Subramanian, co-founder of Mobclix, discussed the Heartbeat
acquisition as well as the Challenge.
Prior to the Heartbeat acquisition, at some point, you must have considered building a revenue tracking
application. What are the complexities that convinced you to buy not build?
Developers had a consistent need for a solution to track revenue across paid applications. For Mobclix, it was
choosing whether or not to build this ourselves or buy something. That choice came down to time to market. By
partnering with Heartbeat, we were able to not only get well-developed software but also a loyal following of
developers (3500 developers). Heartbeat is a complete business dashboard for paid applications, including sales
reports, instant usage data, crash reporting, payment management, reviews and ratings. Paired with our analytics
and advertising options, the combination creates a true one-stop-shop for developers managing their applications.
Where do your mobile advertisers stand with effective attribution modeling for mobile today?
Mobile marketers are getting smarter in terms of ROI and backing all their media buys into an eCPA. Advertisers
need to know how much it will cost them for a new user whether they're using backend metrics, iTunes connect or
a sophisticated dashboard like Mobclix that makes real-time analysis much easier. With Heartbeat, marketers can
optimize campaigns across networks.
How will you maintain "church and state" with the acquisition of Heartbeat? Isn't there a potential of a
conflict of interest in knowing what products are selling and also enabling the buying and selling of
advertising, which sell those products?
We only work directly with ad networks, as opposed to working directly with advertisers or brands. Even if a
developer were to do an ad buy for his application, it would go through an ad network, not just through us.
Looking at your data from the Challenge, why is Mobclix outperforming AdMob?
Mobclix is an ad exchange that allows multiple ad networks to compete for ad inventory - this competition leads to
higher fill rates and maximizes eCPM. Essentially an app developer can leverage the sales team of 20 ad networks
vs a single ad network. Any given ad network cannot fill 100% inventory which accounts for a loss in ad revenue
for the developer. Mobclix allows developers to manage fluctuating sales cycles of ad sales teams, enabling them
to tap into premium campaigns from multiple networks.
How important is the creative to mobile ad performance? Was it the same for both platforms in this test?
Creative saturation has quickly become an issue in the mobile space. Show the same users the same creative
over and over again and of course the CTR will drop. The same ad unit size was used for the test: 300x50. The
creatives varied by advertisers varied from network to network.
In a nutshell, how is Mobclix's exchange model different than AdMob's ad network model?
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Mobclix allows ad networks to reach targeted inventory across mobile apps.We leverage our analytics data to give
ad networks as much insight as possible to help increase campaign performance. Mobclix and Admob do not have
competing products but compete for the same end customer. In both cases developers receive the same rev share
from ad networks - it's the increased CPM and near 100% fill rate that makes a tremendous difference in revenue
for developers using Mobclix.
By John Ebbert
March 3, 2010 – 12:04 a.m.
189
Performance Marketing
Criteo Brings Scale To Display Retargeting Says CEO
Rudelle
April 19, 2010 – 12:10 am
J.B. Rudelle is CEO of Criteo, a pay-per-click, personalized
retargeting company.
AdExchanger.com: Why move into the U.S. market now?
JBR: Criteo spent 3 years focused on R&D, building the most
robust and precise retargeting solution on the market. With almost
2 years of in market experience and over 400 customers
successfully implementing our pay per click (see more)
personalized retargeting solution in Europe, we realize there is an
opportunity to bring a new level of retargeting to the US. Most of
the US players are 18 months behind in terms of capabilities. We
are excited to bring Criteo’s breakthrough technology to the US. In
the few months we have started business here, we are already
seeing great interest in our solution within the top 100 Internet
retailers.
What problem(s) is Criteo solving?
Criteo enables online businesses to efficiently turn visitors who
have left their website into customers through highly relevant
personalized banners which drive potential customers back to the
business website. With the highly efficient CPC model, Criteo
brings scale to display retargeting advertising that was previously associated only in search marketing.
What are the three types of retargeting that you see? And where does Criteo fit?
Over the past decade there has been a slow evolution of retargeting.
The most common, and simple form, is basic static retargeting in which a single static banner is shown to all
viewers who have left a particular website.
In the past couple years, a number of retargeting specialists have introduced a slightly more complex form of
segmented retargeting. This second generation of retargeting enables to display one of a few pre-created
messages to lost visitors based on a particular browsing category they fall into.
Criteo is leading the retargeting revolution with the most sophisticated form of dynamic personalized retargeting.
This third generation of retargeting enables an advertiser to show each lost visitor a unique banner based on his
very specific past interactions on the advertiser’s website. This new form of retargeting involves on-the-fly real-time
personalized banner creation and has a dramatic impact on campaign performances.
Why do you see CPC as better than a CPA model for retargeting? Is the view-through relevant in your
estimation?
CPC is the most straight forward cost model for advertisers since they know exactly what they are paying for. This
also enables advertisers to compare their efficiencies and ROI with paid search which has pioneered and proven
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the validity of the CPC model for several years now. At Criteo we do not consider any “view-though,” “mouse-over”
or other “banner engagement” calculations which are highly controversial in their attribution models.
What advantage is there to building an advertising technology business in Europe? Any disadvantages?
Coming from Europe, makes us even more focused on integrating the highest levels of consumer privacy into our
technologies and policies. We are proud to say that Criteo is the world’s leader in upholding consumer privacy in
this space without sacrificing performance.
Who is responsible for the creative? I imagine that it has a big impact on CTR, and since you get paid via
CPC but bid CPM on the exchanges, it must be an important factor.
Criteo offers its clients a “one-stop-shop” full-service solution which includes everything from customized creative,
media buying and campaign optimization. We work with our clients to incorporate their brand look and feel into the
banners. What is unique to Criteo banners is that each banner is dynamically populated with up to 10 product
recommendations specific to the viewer of the banners. Since banners are created in real-time, they are constantly
being optimized for the best CTRs.
How do you monitor click fraud? Is this a concern for Criteo?
For the majority of our clients, Criteo monitors results all the way through to conversion; therefore, we are
constantly attentive to any fluctuations in click vs. conversion data which would immediately alert us to any type of
fraud. As a result, we have not had any issues of this type in the past.
What is your target market? Any particular verticals, horizontals, big/small budgets, etc.?
Any website which drives an action and is interested in ROI can benefit from Criteo’s performance retargeting
solution. Of course, the more unique site visitors a website has, the more efficient our solution will be in finding
their lost prospects across the internet. We have had particular success with large retail and travel websites to date
and are on-boarding a number of additional online business models with specialized retargeting solutions.
Isn't retargeting a commodity offering now? Especially now that Google has made it so easy and selfservice?
Retargeting has been around for about 10 years now. And I suppose you could claim that basic static retargeting is
indeed becoming a commodity since it is offered by so many players in the market today. However, Criteo’s
ultimate level of personalized retargeting in a pure CPC model provides performance that cannot be matched by
others in the market today.
Do you consider DSPs competitors to Criteo?
No. We are 100% specialized in retargeting, while DSPs have a much broader scope. As a result, we work as the
retargeting partner for many different players in the market, including a number of DSPs.
Please discuss your current funding. Any plans to seek another round? Go public?
We have secured $17M in Series A & B funding in March 2006 and Jan 2008 respectively. At this stage, we have
no need for any additional funding. However, in a very selective way, we might consider a couple of highly targeted
US investors, if their specific expertise makes sense for our business.
Follow Criteo (@criteo) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 19, 2010 – 12:10 am
191
Mexad Enabling Ad Exchange Buying Across Europe Says
CEO Berlik
March 26, 2010 – 9:18 am
Sacha Berlik is CEO & Co-Founder of Mexad, an auction-based Ad Exchange specialists company.
AdExchanger.com: Looking at your experience as GM in
Western Europe for Oridian, what learnings are you bringing
forward to Mexad?
SB: Oridian had account No.1 on Right Media back in 2005 – our
CTO had been Director of AdExchange Management for Oridians
European offices. Our expertise on Ad Exchanges on a European
multinational scale results in so far five years Ad Exchange buying
and optimizing. We not only know how Ad Exchange algorithms
work – but also who in Russia, Israel & the US is able to build &
synchronize them properly.
What problem is Mexad solving today?
Multiple Ad Exchange buying & optimizing. No Arbitrage. We're
platform-agnostic - a "serviced DSP". We have our own
technology, of course, but don’t believe in Advertisers/Agencies
using it. We do it this way due to the fact that the different Ad
Exchange technologies so far haven’t been able to be used without
an extensive knowledge of the different kinds of inventory. What
we mean by that: we know how to run brand-safe campaigns
without relying on the Ad Exchange categories; we also have the
experience working with most of the publishers and their account
managers of media available through Ad Exchanges for the past
five years. A competitive advantage you cannot catch up on within
a year or two. An advertiser/agency using a DSP is lost in a system
not sharing the threats- & weaknesses of the different Ad Exchange Technologies. It leads Advertisers to believe
that they are able to use multiple Ad Exchanges without an extensive knowledge of their traps, e.g. dodgy sites.
The US-market in terms of Publishers in Ad Exchanges is very different to available publishers in Ad Exchanges in
Europe. The European markets not just differ in the amount of Publishers – but also in quality. We know all of
these markets for many years and believe that technology by itself is not able to handle this without the knowledge
of each single European market. No US-based DSP has so far European expertise in evaluating publisher quality.
How will data appending impact the bidding in your system?
A lot. We use Retargeting, negative Retargeting, Behavioural Data, Geotargeting, and so on. eXelate and other
players are good sources for a couple of European markets so far. Still limited compared to the US markets – but
they are in place.
Please discuss how your product line's algorithms support differentiations between audience buying and
site specific buying?
That's different from Ad Exchange to Ad Exchange. But Google ADX 2.0, Appnexus and Right Media support
audience buying – and site specific buying is not our core business. We are specialized in auction based Ad
Exchange buying and don’t want to open the backdoor for "cheap" premium-buys. This business-model won´t work
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in oligopolistic European markets. We always optimize towards advertisers targets. If its audience buying or KPItargets. Discussing this we are optimizing in two steps:
1. static targeting criteria, e.g. region/audience-data/browser-language
2. dynamic targets: e.g. CPA-targets
Our algorithms are able to optimize towards multiple static targets – but only one dynamic target per advertiser
(and if there’s anyone out there able to optimize parallel towards multiple dynamic targets: please email me.).
Where are the significant pockets of ad network or exchange business in Europe? Is it country specific,
vertical specific, etc.?
Country specific, country specific, country specific!!
Even audience segments in different European markets are not able to be compared in terms of campaign results.
Female French 18-30 yrs premium shoppers act totally different to female UK 18-30 yrs premium shoppers. And if
you go to Eastern Europe… you need many years experience to understand these markets.
Let’s take Poland as an example: A market started in 2003 on the technology level of that time. Using Ad
Exchanges as a matter of course.
Italy: A market started in 1999: Using Ad Exchanges reluctantly
Netherlands: Very Oligopolistic market. To be honest I know just 2-3 social communities there using Ad
Exchanges.
How does it break out for Mexad in terms of percentage of DR vs. brand, and agency vs. direct advertiser
clients? And, how are you solving attribution for these clients? Is it a challenge?
Our clients are mainly agencies (90%+). We serve them though our offices in London, Vienna and Cologne. DR is
the buzzword when it comes to use the benefits of RTB. That’s our core business for mainly brand advertisers
looking for performance. We don’t believe in single premium-buys via Ad Exchanges.
How do we solve attribution? We deliver results compared to Ad networks. That’s all. We cut off arbitrage from the
ones buying unsynchronized in Ad Exchanges and making a good living out of a non-transparent arbitrage.
We have a fixed commission and agencies have full transparency of what we are doing out there in the field…
Are you concerned about "blackhat" tactics in an RTB-enabled environment?
Of course I am concerned of "blackhat" tactics. These freaks who cheated the last years Ad Exchange traffic won't
stop. Just see how clever clickfraud happens in Ad Exchanges. We developed technologies to skirt around this
with some smart solutions.
Audience-fraud is another topic which will grow massively in the upcoming months. Not to forget fake national-IP's.
It´s an endless story and even this is different from one European market to another. A self-service DSP can't
guarantee a secure ad placement. You need local European Ad Exchange veterans knowing the bad Pubs hidden
in an anonymous Ad Exchange environment (even if it’s imaginary transparent).
Do you feel that Mexad's business is threatened by regulation in the EU?
The part of our business depending of audience segments is, of course, threatened by regulations of the EU. We
will see a decreasing amount of user data if the regulations will take place. Also all kinds of retargeting, negative
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retargeting, post-view & post-click tracking could be seriously harmed if you need to opt-In for every single cookie.
Let’s wait and see. It will be just a new challenge and we are prepared for that.
A year from now, what milestones would you like Mexad to have accomplished?
In Q3/Q4 we will have two more European offices in place. In 12 Months we still remain the only pan-european
"serviced" DSP with 4-5 more European offices to serve the very unique media needs of the main European
media-markets. A French media-planner has different needs in Ad Exchange buys then a Portuguese mediaplanner – and we are prepared for that. Not only speaking the language but knowing the specific regional media
needs.
Follow Mexad (@mexad) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 26, 2010 – 9:18 am
194
MediaTrust CEO Bordes Discusses Bardon Acquisition
And Performance Marketing Momentum
April 27, 2010 – 2:10 am
Yesterday in a release, performance marketing company
MediaTrust announced that it had acquired Bardon Advisors, a
"Los Angeles-based, CPC search & affiliate marketing platform for
online advertisers and publishers." In the process, it named Bardon
Founder & CEO Keith Cohn as President of MediaTrust. Read
more.
Peter Bordes, CEO of MediaTrust, discussed the acquisition and
the performance marketing space.
AdExchanger.com: Why does this combination of Bardon
Advisors and MediaTrust make sense?
PB: We believe that online media is evolving towards platformdriven ecosystems and will eventually move even further to
performance-based pricing. We see cpms and cpcs as currencies
for driving liquidity in performance driven transactions. Our goal is to make sure the MediaTrust platform has all the
tools, expertise, and pricing models in place to facilitate and accommodate this shift. Bardon adds an entire turnkey quality-driven cpc/search marketing capabilities layer onto the MediaTrust platform that increases ROI for our
agency, advertiser, publisher and affiliate marketer partners.
How many employees does Bardon Advisors have? How will you integrate them?
12 full-time, that will be fully integrated into the MediaTrust organization. We have created a very scalable platform
that makes it easy to integrate Bardon into.
Bardon has built a very efficient team and culture that shares the same collaborative partnership-centric values we
have created at MediaTrust . We are thrilled to have Keith join as President and partner in MediaTrust . He has
experience building large organizations and will add great knowledge to help us take the Mediatrust organization
into its next phase of growth.
What needs to happen to grow platform-based buying in the lead generation and/or affiliate marketing
space?
We have to drive growth by innovating and moving from a service & network model to being technology and
platform centric. We don't think we are too far off from broader adoption of platform buying, as the industry is going
through a next round of consolidation that is further driving the adoption of platform-based transactions. Our clients
are using it today and we will be releasing more technology that drives this further in the near future. This is the
only way we as an emerging segment of the internet marketing industry can scale.
To answer your question more specifically:
We need technology that facilitates dynamic quality-driven systems and pricing that rewards publishers for driving
higher quality. This is the spark of starting more exchange-like transactions where advertisers can begin to bid on
traffic. A focus on quality will further elevate the good from the mediocre and the bad (which affiliate marketing has
a reputation for and needs to move away from). All traffic is not created equal and we need to have technology that
drives and supports this.
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Another thing that needs changing is the mindset that online direct response and brand building are mutually
exclusive. If you execute a well-designed online direct response campaign, you get the brand building for free. If
you aren't looking at it that way, then you aren't working with the right partner.
We also have to make sure that innovation in the performance space moves well ahead of where it is today (which
is non-existent). Traditionally, this industry hasn’t been known for its technical innovation and has been primarily
driven by "highest payouts and exclusives" which is not a scalable or sustainable business model. This emerging
business segment has a tremendous amount of room for technology that will drive platform buying forward. We
have not even scratched the surface yet.
Finally, as an industry we have to continue to push the concepts of true transparency and compliancy so the tier 2
and tier 1 advertisers are more attracted to doing more online direct response. The needs of the agencies and
brands starting to enter the space will drive the shift to create performance driven analytics, automation and
deeper transparency tools and reporting.
Given moves in the space such as Quinstreet, can you see MediaTrust going public someday? Is this the
end game for lead generation companies?
First of all, we see ourselves as much more than a lead generation company. Lead gen is only one small part of
the value we offer to advertisers and publishers. We offer a turn-key platform to allow partners to choose the result
they want to pay for - regardless of whether that means leads, sales or clicks - all on a single platform. The
customer decides (because the customer knows best) the desired outcome they seek with the campaign. At
MediaTrust, we see ourselves as problem solvers with a portfolio of tools to create highly customized and diverse
programs for our advertising and publishing partners. We are not a one size fits all platform.
As for IPO versus M+A versus staying private: We follow the mantra "if you build it they will come." We are focused
on creating a long term scalable business with enterprise value. We seek to build the most stable and successful
firm in our industry segment for our shareholders, business partners and fellow members of the MediaTrust
organization. Depending on external factors, opportunities and the economy, we could go in any one of several
directions. We will know when we get there. We are just getting started.
By John Ebbert
April 27, 2010 – 2:10 am
196
PerformLine Offering Cross-Digital Channel Verification
Says CEO Baydin
March 3, 2010 – 12:06 am
Alex Baydin, Founder and CEO of PerformLine, an online
performance marketing company.
AdExchanger.com: Please discuss your background. What
key learning’s did you bring forward from Epic Advertising
where you were GM to PerformLine?
AB: I have been in Online Advertising for the past ten (10) years,
focusing mainly on advertising sales, business development, and
product marketing and management. Prior to founding
PerformLine, I started at United Online in Business Development,
then worked at Quigo Technologies (since acquired by AOL)
heading publisher acquisition efforts for their AdSonar contextual
ad product, and Epic Advertising as a GM of the Lead Generation
division.
Working with AdSonar at Quigo, we quickly realized the correlation
between giving publishers a platform to be seen apart from a blind
network and their ability to receive fair value for their inventory. My
time at Epic was valuable in learning about the non-premium and
performance-based network model. There is a great opportunity for
monetization in the non-premium network space, but there are also many dimly lit corners that advertisers may not
have the tolerance for.
From your perspective, what's broken with the ad network model and how is PerformLine addressing this
deficiency?
The trust that existed between advertiser and network is broken. We are telling agencies and advertisers to trust,
but verify. We are providing publishers and networks the proof they may need to maintain credibility and bring on
an entirely new set of advertisers who may not be buying today because they have concerns about brand safety,
compliance and wasted spend. Our platform allows reputable networks to earn fair value for their inventory,
instead of having their CPMs dragged down by lower quality networks that have provided advertisers with bad
experiences and damaged the trust.
Is PerformLine in the verification/validation space with AdXpose, DoubleVerify, AdSafe Media, Brand.net
etc.? Who is the competition? Given your lead generation roots, it could be quite broad. And, what should
people think of PerformLine as?
Yes, we are all competing at some level to provide independent third party verification. However, as the verification
space matures, the differentiation between offerings will become more important for the market. PerformLine’s
platform is the broadest reaching verification platform in-market, offering Display, Email and Lead Generation
verification all in one place. Brand Advertisers are realizing that although they may only be currently running
display, they may decide to test email next quarter; working with a platform that also verifies email makes sense.
Performance Marketers can think of us as a way to safely verify publisher/affiliate hosted landing pages for
compliance.
Does PerformLine buy data today and, if so, is it hard to know what it's worth? What's your process like in
this area?
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For certain media types that we verify such as Email, we do buy some data that may supplement some or own
data mining efforts. We have built great relationships with best-in-breed data partners. Like any partnership, there
needs to be an equal exchange of value for it to work long term.
Is the lead generation space ready for data-driven, display ad marketing as has been recently popularized
by demand-side platforms as well as data companies and exchanges like BlueKai, eXelate, TARGUSinfo,
Datalogix, etc.?
Lead generation and performance marketing players are the early experimenters of data-driven display marketing.
They purchased the majority of the display media during the most recent economic downturn. At some level, the
DSPs owe a lot of their initial growth to these marketers because when the brands were not spending, the
performance guys picked up the slack and learned how to make display media back-out to hit their metrics and do
it with scale.
What can PerformLine offer brand advertisers? In general, do you think the metrics are there yet to satisfy
the brands with digital display marketing?
Our technology provides brand advertisers with a way to protect their brand from appearing next to non-approved
content. We score traffic sources based on their compliance with an advertiser’s targeting and marketing rules as
well as provide screenshots of where their ads are placed. We will soon be launching a real-time pre-emptive
feature that will block an advertiser’s ad from being served if the content of the URL does not meet the advertiser’s
approval.
Brands have always had a variety of tools and analytics available them to understand the effectiveness of their
online display marketing. With campaign verification, brands can now be un-fettered as to which networks, ad
exchanges and publishers they buy display media from because they will know exactly where and how their brand
is appearing.
Do you think another round of funding will be necessary for PerformLine?
We are operating close to profitability today so we do not need funding, having said that, the vision of the company
and our customer base is demanding a roadmap at an increasingly rapid pace. We may consider the right partner
to accelerate that roadmap for our customers.
Follow PerformLine (@performline) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 3, 2010 – 12:06 am
198
TellApart Targeting Incremental Revenue For E-Commerce
Says CEO McFarland
April 16, 2010 – 11:42 am
Josh McFarland is CEO of TellApart, an online media buying
platform.
AdExchanger.com: Is TellApart a demand-side platform?
JM: Our core business is in helping e-commerce companies unify,
manage and predictively analyze their customer data -- all within a
"customer database in the cloud." Of course, what good is a
beautifully manicured customer list without a way to drive more
revenue from it? From that angle, we are a DSP-OTS... demandside platform on the side. Yes, we have built one of the best media
buying systems out there -- but we use it internally to power our
display ad applications like Transactional Retargeting.
What problem is TellApart solving?
TellApart helps e-commerce companies drive incremental revenue
through the analysis and use of their own customer data. Ecommerce CMOs are finding that search, comparison shopping,
and their email lists have all reaching the point of massively
diminishing returns. They look at display ads and think, "why
haven't we been able to make this channel ROI positive?" We help
them use their customer data to do exactly that. And over time,
you'll see us move into all types of marketing channels and
programs -- all underpinned by this core idea of using customer
data to make better informed decisions.
What's the difference between retargeting and audience targeting?
I'm a firm believer that a majority of display ads in the near future will be targeted using one form or another of
what the industry today generically refers to as "retargeting." For the sake of definition, let's agree that the
technique of retargeting is simply the ability to get an impression in front of a user you've seen before.
For ads which target bottom-of-the-funnel behaviors (ex. cart abandonment), we refer to this as Transactional
Retargeting: bringing the user back and facilitating their conversion completion. For users who are not currently
engaged in a buying process but who are still part of a retailer's customer database (previous visitor or buyer), they
too can be "retargeted," but I prefer to think of this as a form of audience targeting. And finally, audience targeting
can also include the ability to reach potential new customers who have never visited a particular retailer's site... but
who have been modeled to have a high propensity to be interested nonetheless, given their activity on TellApart
clients' sites. For TellApart, it's the notion of predicted Customer Quality that guides who has the potential to be
reached via this last group.
What is your target market and how do you differentiate?
We service large and mid-size e-commerce companies, and today we mostly focus on online retailers. While the
overall vision for our customer data platform is much farther reaching, the first application on this platform -Transactional Retargeting -- competes primarily with Acerno, Dotomi and Criteo. In an effort not to be overly handwavy, let me say this first: we differentiate ourselves via our business model (below) and our results. And that
alone tends to speak volumes for our clients.
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How do we get these results that allow us to pursue such an aggressive model? Team and technology. As a
largely ex-Google team, we get this ads stuff cold: my co-founder and I launched the AdWords API, which today
touches well over half of Google's revenue, and my last 1.5 years there were spent creating the building blocks of
Google's new display ads initiatives. Our team's technology is similarly without compare: continuously selfretraining models, a massive cloud-infrastructure architecture that keeps our costs insanely low despite the amount
of client data we hold, and one of the most efficient ad servers in production.
Please discuss your revenue model and how it works.
For our Transactional Retargeting application, we get paid a percentage of the incremental revenue that is driven
by *clicks* on retargeted display ads. This is the most pure form of CPA, and this model allows advertisers to stop
paying for fraudulent view-through conversions. We have other applications which we will be announcing over
time that will have other innovative business models too, but in all cases you will see us always try to align our
incentives with our clients as closely as possible. The best businesses are like Google AdWords; the advertiser
knows when they put $1 in the machine, $1.25 will come back out.
What trends are you seeing among your clients today?
Though our vision applies to any ecommerce business (subscriptions, virtual goods, lead gen, etc.), we are
currently focused on the Internet Retailer 500 companies. If you look at the evolution of advertisers on search, it
was lead gen, followed by ecommerce, then brand marketers. In this second coming of display, it's been lead gen
then brands. Online retailers are noticeably absent from a medium that should be a major part of their marketing;
we intend to change that.
Working with this group of companies has been amazing because they are exceptionally smart, they know their
metrics to the penny and they don't typically use agencies. Working with in-house teams means that our
integrations are fast, we get instantaneous feedback on our performance, and when we win, we become an
irreplaceable part of their revenue stream.
What is your view on RTB? Is it essential to your business?
Reatime bidding is increasingly essential to our business because everything we do on the modeling side is at a
per-user level. The more granular we can define user cohorts, the more highly performing the campaigns. RTB
allows for an evolution of targeting that allows... to quote Tim Armstrong when he was running Google Sales,
"precision at scale." It's not necessarily the "real time" nature of the bidding so much as it is the ability de-average
targeting into "per user." That said, we also make non-RTB campaigns work incredibly well.
Given your recent piece against charging for view-thrus, it makes sense that you're pursuing a click-based
CPA business model. But, isn't that risky?
Anytime a campaign is done on a click-CPA basis, it's risky for the vendor because we bear the cost of driving
users but have no control over what happens after that. But if you believe the advertiser is always optimizing for
visitor conversion (which e-commerce companies are), then incentives can be perfectly aligned. And when you
remove risk for the buyer, you find the conversation is like discussing a partnership, not a sales call.
What insights can you share about where Google is headed, having worked there for so many years?
Google is going to win in display ads to a degree that I don't think most people, even those in the industry, realize.
As major buyers of inventory from exchanges, networks, yield optimizers and direct publishers, we run retargeting
campaigns on each that are apples to apples. And right now, Google has the best apples.
People dismiss the Google Content Network as being full of low quality long tail publishers, but I'm telling you -- it's
got inventory that performs better than anyone else. And, by the way, it's expensive stuff; this isn't about trolling
for cheap impressions. So I think Google's success will be positive for all sides: we platforms who appreciate
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Google's technology leadership, buyers who want highly performing inventory, and publishers who expect to be
paid well for their content & audiences.
And, I want to make a prediction that you can hold me to 18 months from now: Google will enable search
retargeting for display ads and it will be awesome. This is purely my opinion and is based on zero inside
knowledge, and if Larry Page reads this, he will probably slap me himself for such blasphemy. But I see the signs!
How is TellApart funded? Do you anticipate seeking venture financing in the near future? If so, what might
be the catalysts?
We recently announced our $4.75MM Series A financing, led by Greylock Partners and don't anticipate taking any
more funding for a good while. Indeed, some of the best companies in the world (ex. Google) have only needed to
visit the VC well once!
Follow TellApart (@tellapart) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 16, 2010 – 11:42 am
201
Publishers
PlentyOfFish.com CEO Frind Says Selling Your Site’s Data
Will Reduce Your Site’s CPMs
January 8, 2010 – 5:34 am
Markus Frind is CEO of PlentyOfFish.com, an online dating site.
AdExchanger.com: The background is fairly wellknown about Plenty of Fish (Inc. Magazine, 2009)
- free dating site that has taken off with huge
traffic and interest - and all built and serviced by
one guy - you. Have things changed? Hire
anyone?
MF: I don't want to do everything myself. With over
100 million monthly visitors and 2.5 Billion monthly
pageviews it gets complicated. We've hired a few
people for customer service and to build out our
advertising efforts.
AdExchanger.com: What are your thoughts about
display advertising these days? Does it work?
Everyone is using the wrong metrics these days.
What does CPM really mean in terms of business? I think a far better metric that we use is monetization per pixel.
If a 728*90 ad has the same CTR and CPM as a ad a fraction of the size why would you ever use bigger ad
formats?
The future of online advertising is not with bigger ad formats, or even existing ones. If you advertise on Facebook
you will see 3 of their ad units fit in an existing skyscraper unit. But, on exchanges and elsewhere, you can buy
their skyscraper cheaper than you can an individual ad!
A month or so ago, you launched a new self serve ad platform on Plenty of Fish. Why?
Existing ad exchanges, ad networks and others couldn't effectively monetize our traffic, we have over 100
variables on each user such as age, gender, income, profession, where they like to vacation, if they prefer to eat
out or in, if they are shy, etc. But, no platform could make use of this data. Our new system lets advertisers big and
small target their audience down to a zip code level.
Any plans to leverage your new system across non-POF properties? Such as white-labeling or even
creating an ad network?
Right now, our system relies on having a lot of information on each user such as age and gender. The vast
majority of sites have inferred data or no data at all. This makes it very hard for us to white label our system
outside of the dating/social networking space.
How do you sell inventory for Plenty of Fish? Are exchanges helpful or still a work in progress?
202
Ad exchanges simply can't compete with our self service ad platform. Most companies in the advertising space are
frantically trying to get more information about their users such as age, gender etc. We are swamped with so much
information we don't know what to do with it.
How much creative flexibility is there for the advertiser?
There is actually quite a bit of flexibility - the image as well as text can be customized. While it may not seem like a
lot of room compared to the standard IAB units, there is a great variance in CTR between them as a result of
minute changes. Ads with higher CTRs don't always have the highest conversion. More so, on a site like ours the
creative flexibility lies in being able to hyper target certain demographics and change your creative accordingly.
The ad you show different demographics shouldn't be the same. Single mothers and single fathers may both be
your target, but they react and interact very differently with an ad.
Do you ever buy advertising? Any recommendations you would make to online marketers given your
extensive experience on the sell-side?
I buy a lot of ads and I sell a lot of ads. Clicks mean absolutely nothing, if you are doing a major buy in 2 weeks
take one week to get a baseline for your traffic, the moment you turn on those ads measure what delta from the
baseline you have and measure what happens after you stop advertising. Yes view throughs are useful but
measuring viralness of an ad spend is far far more powerful. If you are selling ads remember that no one is looking
to waste money, no matter if you are selling CPM, CPA, or CPC everyone is backing it out to some number and
seeing if they have positive ROI, if its positive they will spend more.
Are data exchanges such as BlueKai and eXelate a part of your revenue model? What do you think of data
exchanges?
Definitely not. If you give out data, others will use that data to target ads. The end result is CPM's on your site go
down because the users have previously been exposed to these highly targeted ads on other sites. Moreover, the
incremental revenue these exchanges offer is minimal compared to what the targeting information is worth when
retained by us.
If you had to pick one or two key trends you see coming in the next 12-24 months in online advertising,
what would they be?
Accountability and real measurement. If your ad buys are large you will know right away if you have positive ROI or
not. In the case of a dating site, it's by how many people sign-up. When I do an ad buy, I ignore all other metrics
except what the delta in sign-ups are.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
January 8, 2010 – 5:34 am
203
United Online’s CSO Helfand Discusses Adcurate
Audience-Buying Platform
April 6, 2010 – 9:32 am
Jeremy Helfand, EVP and Chief Sales Officer, at United Online,
discussed the company's new audience-buying platform - Adcurate
- which enables audience buying of United Online properties.
AdExchanger.com: How will United Online differentiate from
competitors such as Fox Audience Network with the
Adcurate™ platform?
JH: Adcurate is intensely focused on audiences – who they are, how best to reach them, and what insights are
available from marketing to them. We think advertisers and their agencies need to be more discerning of data
sources and inventory in the audience-buying environment. Having direct access to verified demographics on our
audiences in addition to owned and operated media makes Adcurate a preferred audience-buying solution.
How do you manage potential conflict between your direct sales efforts and the Adcurate platform?
We have found that channel conflict between direct and indirect sales is sometimes more perception than reality,
and often unnecessary. As a publisher, we’ve been addressing channel conflict for years With Adcurate, we are
using some of the same approaches that allow a publisher to maximize its value when using both direct and
indirect channels, such as prioritization, types of data available, and other tactics. Ultimately, we strive to align our
organizational objectives so that everyone wins when all channels do well.
Can you discuss impressions levels currently running through the Adcurate platform? And, will you allow
other demand-side platforms to buy from you or are you going direct to the advertiser? Your release notes
the feedback from "top advertisers."
We are interested in efficiently and effectively utilizing the data in our audience platform. So, to the extent there are
companies, like DSP’s, that can benefit from our audience platform and help extract the value of a “top of the
funnel” brand solution, we are willing to talk.
Do you think that in order for publishers to unlock audience data, they will need to build their own platform
as United Online has done?
It’s a tall task. We actually created a new company inside of United Online for Adcurate. We believe what we’ve
developed allows us to most effectively harness the value and knowledge of our audiences and best make that
available to the market. You have to have the scale and reach to make this an appropriate value proposition for
advertisers. Most importantly, I think publishers need to better understand how valuable their data can be and
protect that value.
By John Ebbert
April 6, 2010 – 9:32 am
204
Media Buying Ad Technology
Centro Looks To Automate The Buying Of Premium
Inventory With Transis Says Pres Riegsecker
Email This Post
March 10, 2010 – 8:39 am
Shawn Riegsecker is Founder & President of Centro, a media services
and technology firm and makers of Transis, a media buying system.
AdExchanger.com: Can you discuss the pivots in Centro's
business model since 2001? And how has it led today's Transis
offering?
Centro’s vision is the same today as the day we started. Our whole
belief was that, with the fragmentation of media choices, agencies and
buyers wouldn’t be able to scale digital via old processes and using
outdated tools like spreadsheets, emails, phones and faxes. Great
software was going to have to come into the mix to automate the entire
process from beginning to end. We figured if we could create
automated software that could profitably scale local online, which is one
of the hardest and most fragmented parts of the industry, we could help
agencies become more profitable by giving them the software to use
also.
After years of developing the software, using it and perfecting it
internally, it was time to release it to the industry.
What problem is Transis solving?
Planning, placing, tracking and reconciling digital campaigns are a
nightmare for most agencies. A 2009 AAAAs report said the cost of servicing a digital campaign averages about
25% to 30% of the media cost compared to 2% for TV. This is unsustainable. The problem is the industry spends
around 80% of its time in low-value transactional activities versus highly strategic and creative thinking. Transis
automates the low-value activities and gives digital media teams anywhere from 30% to 70% more of their time
back to do the important things they like to do and their clients want them to do.
AdExchanger.com: Centro offers a range of services. How do you anticipate the company evolving with
Transis? Will it become a sole focus, for example?
Our entire goal is to help agencies be more successful and their employees happier. With the launch of Transis,
we now have three ways to partner with an agency: Transis only, Shared Services and Centro Media Services.
Transis is a purely software-based relationship—we give them the keys and they’re off and running.
Shared Services is a hybrid relationship where we give the agency the front-end planning and buying module to
Transis and we, Centro, handle all the ad operations and billing reconciliation. We don’t consider ad operations
and month-end billing reconciliation to be competitive advantages to an agency so they can outsource this
transactional work to Centro and we’ll handle all of it for them.
And Centro Media Services will continue to invest in and do what it’s done for the past eight years: help make
digital media execution easy for agencies with a heavy focus on placing local online media.
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In your Transis announcement press release, Peter Krasilovsky of BIA/Kelsey says, “Transis is automating
the other 80 percent of the display industry" that demand-side platforms don't address. Please explain why
this is true.
We believe ad exchanges and DSPs provide an important function in the industry but, today, less than 20% of
display dollars spent is via DSPs and ad exchanges; in fact, I believe eMarketer projects their market share around
30% by the end of 2012. So the obvious question is: who’s focused on automating the other 80% of the display
market? That’s where Transis comes in.
Your release also notes the buying of "premium" inventory with Transis. How do you define "premium"?
We define premium as transactions that contractually take place directly between a buyer and a seller. By
automating the transactional work buyers and sales people are doing all day, we expect Transis to enhance the
personal relationships and allow them to work more collaboratively on bigger ideas and more strategic campaigns.
How will you gain critical mass for Transis?
In the same way we built Centro: through direct relationships with agencies across America. Our team’s mantra is
that they don’t want satisfied customers but rather they try to create “Raving Fans” of our services and now, our
software. Although it’s software, we believe the people and the service behind the software are more important
than anything and we’re committed to having the best software and the best people to over-service our agency
partners.
It appears that placement is a key part of Transis. How does this address agencies need for audience
buying?
Yes, Transis excels at helping agencies buy from more publishers and more sellers directly. However, every ad
network exists inside the system also. So if people are buying audiences through multiple networks, it will
streamline those relationships as well.
Do ad exchanges such as Doubleclick Ad Exchange or Right Media Exchange fit with Transis?
No; as of today, Transis does not have the ability to buy inventory from the major ad exchanges.
Besides media agencies, what other benefits do you see for ecosystem members such as publishers or
creative agencies?
It’s a great question that addresses two sides of the coin—and I’d even throw in helping agencies work more
efficiently with their clients versus just publishers. We are aggressively developing software internally and forming
external partnerships that will create a seamless marketplace for ad agencies across 100% of all digital
opportunities. We see an open and connected world in the near future that helps clients, agencies and publishers
eliminate the meaningless and low-value work in the industry; allowing everyone to focus on the more important
and strategic work for the marketers and brands we all serve.
A year from now, what milestones would you like to have seen Centro and Transis accomplish?
At Centro, we know that success is never a foregone conclusion, no matter how great of an idea or how great of
software you bring to market. Everything in life comes down to execution. A year seems like an eternity away at
this moment, we’re just keeping our heads down and focusing on executing our business plan over the next few
months—that’s all we can control. If we execute well relative to what we can control, I’ll be incredibly proud of our
team wherever we end up a year from now.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 10, 2010 – 8:39 am
206
What Atlas And DoubleClick Did For Direct Marketers,
Pictela Will Do For Brand Marketers Says CEO Rogers
April 5, 2010 – 8:08 am
Greg Rogers is CEO of Pictela, a brand content distribution
platform.
AdExchanger.com: How is your Tacoda experience relevant to
what you're doing today with Pictela?
GR: At Tacoda we developed a sophisticated targeting engine.
Now that the industry can effectively reach the right people, the
next step is to build an advanced messaging platform that delivers
maximum impact and relevancy everywhere online. That’s Pictela.
What problem is Pictela solving?
The current online marketing ecosystem was built on the principle
of user dislocation. We have a $25 billion industry based on
moving consumers from one place to another. Click and visitation
patterns show that consumers have grown weary of this.
Consumers want brand experiences wherever they happen to be.
Pictela solves this problem. In just the last 90 days we have been certified by 20 major publishers and now reach
over 120 million consumers worldwide. Pictela is Facebook-approved and runs directly in the News Feed. The
units are published to blogs and used as PR. Pictela goes everywhere a consumer spends their time.
Can you provide a use case of how and why a piece of brand content is delivered?
Here’s a great example of what Pictela does: Burberry produced a series of beautiful photos and videos for their
spring/summer 2010 collection starring Emma Watson of the Harry Potter movies. This brand content was
distributed through our platform to publishers like Hearst, Conde Nast, Time, Inc., and Hachette in ad inventory
across North America and Western Europe. The engagement levels were like nothing we have ever seen. People
shared the units to their Facebook pages for all their friends to see.
What was fascinating were the differences, by country, in terms of interaction and sharing. Consumers globally are
ready, willing and able to share brand content.
What's the market opportunity?
Online still only garners 10% of total media spend despite representing 30% of consumer time spent. That’s a
300% growth potential that Pictela will address.
Also, catalogers spend $60 billion each year creating and distributing brand content. However, these offline
industries have a growing distribution problem. Pictela allows all of this offline content to come online at the fraction
of the cost of direct mail and FSI.
How does Pictela's revenue model work?
When we serve brand content into ad inventory we work on a CPM model and shared impressions are free. If
there is no paid media component we serve content into social media environments based on a serving fee.
207
Can you share any current client momentum and the company's target market? Profitable?
We are experiencing powerful growth this year. Retailers like Macy’s, Burberry, and Victoria’s Secret are now on
the platform. CPG clients are also flocking to Pictela–they have a tremendous amount of content that they need to
surface outside of their web sites. Auto, entertainment, travel and pharma are also hot categories.
Any marketer with brand content or a publisher partnership where they have access to content is an ideal client for
Pictela. Quite soon every marketer will have a brand content strategy.
In general, in terms of brand dollars moving online, what needs to happen?
What Atlas and DoubleClick did for direct marketers, Pictela will do for brand marketers. Our platform not only
allows marketers to serve high definition brand content wherever consumers happen to be, but also gives them the
ability to track it all: across paid, earned, and owned media.
This is not an easy thing to do, incidentally. Fortunately, we have a great technology team with amazing
leadership!
How can publishers work with Pictela? What's in it for pubs?
Pictela Certified publishers benefit in three ways. First, because Pictela serves unlimited amounts of high definition
content into ad units, we make publisher inventory more valuable and effective. Second, because Pictela focuses
only on premium publishers and portals, we help them create a differentiated offering. Third, with our deep agency
and client relationships, we are creating new revenue opportunities for our partners.
A year from now, what milestones would you like to have seen the company accomplish?
Our goal is to put brand content at the center of the marketing enterprise.
Throughout 2010 we will continue to focus on technology and distribution. Pictela will announce a number of key
partnerships in the months ahead. These will be very interesting! Also, we will start to bring leading creative
agencies onto the platform.
In 2011 we will focus on growth and will develop into a true global company. Ideally, by the end of 2011, we will
have hundreds of great clients on the platform. Pictela will be providing each client with unprecedented insights
into their consumers and how they are interacting with and sharing brand content.
Follow Pictela (@pictela) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 5, 2010 – 8:08 am
208
The Trade Desk CEO Green Announces Funding And
Investors
Email This Post
March 23, 2010 – 6:10 am
Jeff Green, former COO of ad exchange, AdECN (which was
purchased by Microsoft in 2007), spoke with AdExchanger.com
about the funding of his new company, The Trade Desk.
AdExchanger.com: What have you been up to since you left
Microsoft's AdECN?
JG: Since nearly the day I left, I’ve been focused on creating a new company, The Trade Desk.
What's the investment look like - How much? Who? Why this group?
The environment for raising money has changed a lot since I first left Microsoft. Capital is moving into the space
again in a way that it wasn’t even 6 months ago. Given that we gave investors a healthy ROI when we sold
AdECN, we had lots of options. Of course, having lots of options allows us to be very deliberate and strategic
about the money we raise.
We looked for investors that we wanted to work with and would provide far more than just capital. We think raising
money pre-revenue is about optimizing for the maximization of options. While there can be benefits to taking
institutional money early, we found that a seed round with strategic investors and a group of solid angels gives The
Trade Desk the best chance at success.
With that approach, we’ve closed the first tranche of our seed round of financing of approximately $2.5 Million. The
round was lead by two funds, Founder Collective (www.foundercollective.com) led by Eric Paley and IA Venture
Partners (www.iaventurepartners.com) led by Roger Ehrenberg. We also have great group of strategic investors
that have followed on the round. Those investors include Jerry Neumann, who used to run the interactive media
investment arm of the Omnicom Group (NYSE: OMC) and Josh Stylman, who was co-CEO and Managing Partner
of Reprise Media, a division of Interpublic (NYSE:IPG)
We expect to finish the second and last tranche of our seed round by the end of next week, which will further
lengthen the list of industry insiders that are in this deal.
Any sense of current sentiment from the investment community (VC or angels) right now in regards to ad
technology companies? Are demand or supply side tools of more interest these days, for example?
As I mentioned, the market is getting lots more capital attention in 2010 than it did in 2009. I suspect this year will
be multiples better than 2009 in terms of the number of deals and the number of dollars.
In terms of areas getting attention, I do think the demand side is getting more attention than the supply side. But
I’ve heard a lot of large publishers grumbling about that, so I don’t expect it to last long.
I would add that the benefits and hype of RTB has most investors and industry insiders believing that the industry
is going to be very different in 3-5 years than the industry that we have today. Clearly most of them believe that this
shift will create a new generation of successful companies that they can fund.
What do you hope to do with these initial funds?
209
These funds will take us to initial product launch and build out our team.
We’ve already assembled a great team of ad exchange and industry experts, and we’ll continue to add to that.
What's the basic premise of The Trade Desk?
Basically, we answer one of the most difficult questions in advertising: what is this impression and this user worth
to this advertiser at this instance?
To do that takes lots of systems, partnerships, technology, math, and expertise. It also requires a lot of data, so
we’ve created a unique value prop for data owners and data managers.
By John Ebbert
March 23, 2010 – 6:10 am
210
Platform Technology
AppNexus Is A Real-Time Ad Platform – The On-Ramp For
Companies Like DSPs Says CEO O’Kelley
April 1, 2010 – 10:26 am
Brian O'Kelley is CEO of AppNexus, a real-time ad platform.
AdExchanger.com: Busy? What's the hardest part of growing
a successful start-up?
BOK: Yes, we've been extremely busy at AppNexus
commercializing our ad platform with some of the most
sophisticated online marketers, ad networks and DSPs in the
business. Growing a successful start-up of course also means
building up a team of the best and the brightest, and we've been
able to recruit some serious talent over the past few months. We
recently announced that Lauren Nemeth from Google joined us as
Director of Sales and Timothy G. Smith from Vonage joined as our
Vice President of Technical Operations. They are huge wins for us
and we're delighted to have them on board. We will be making
more personnel announcements in the near future, but we also
want the industry to know that we're still hiring, and looking to bring
on more superstars across the board, including sales, client
services, engineering and marketing.
Is AppNexus solution for direct response marketers or brand?
Companies who care about performance, and leveraging data and intelligence in real-time are our main audience.
We think that those goals transcend the traditional notions of direct response versus brand advertising. Our core
constituents certainly include direct response oriented online marketers and ad networks but also extremely brandconscious advertisers. We've invested a great deal in ensuring brand protection as a core value proposition at
AppNexus. For example, we offer our clients a tiered guidebook of the available inventory on the web, from which
they can pick and choose depending on their needs, so they can guarantee media quality. We're really aggressive
in the area of brand safety. Again, we don't want to pigeon-hole the types of clients we work with, but they all fit a
certain profile which is performance-driven, brand-aware, and data-driven.
How will you differentiate from other demand-side platform (DSP) competitors in the space?
We're a real-time ad platform, and a number of our valued partners are DSPs. We prefer to get away from labels
and talk about what's unique with our model, which is that we're the only player exclusively focused on being a true
ad platform that can plug deeply into our clients online advertising businesses, allowing them to more efficiently
optimize and execute what they've already been doing or aspire to do. The shift to real-time advertising is
revolutionizing the way media is bought and sold, but it's very expensive and difficult to manage. Think of the
AppNexus ad platform as the on-ramp for companies like DSPs, direct marketers and ad networks to gain access
to the real-time bidding (RTB) super-highway.
Do you think repeatable success using RTB strategies at scale is available today? If not, when do we get
there and what are the obstacles?
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It's early days right now. Our belief at AppNexus is that the ecosystem will continue to grow and scale at a high
rate for the foreseeable future. Having said that, we're producing some of the earliest true successes in the
industry, as evidenced by eBay which has sustained very high return on investment with real-time bidding (RTB)
via the AppNexus platform for more than a year now.
March 12 was the first official announcement from AppNexus regarding its product line and direction in a
long time. What took so long?
We've been heads down focusing on the product, our roll-out strategy, and building out our already deep
relationships with the ad exchanges, ad networks and flagship clients like eBay. We recently had a marketing
launch, an area we haven't spent a lot of time on until now. We felt the time was now right to start talking publicly
about our activities at AppNexus, based on our clients' successes with our platform and our ability to produce
tangible case studies. Basically, we preferred to wait until we could back up the hype that's so prevalent in the
industry with some solid performance.
Incidentally, we're looking forward to being more public-facing at Ad:Tech San Francisco and are hosting a private
client event at the Four Seasons San Francisco the morning after the conference concludes. The focus will be
what is really working in the world of real-time advertising for ad networks, one of our core constituencies.
Does eBay represent the ideal client for AppNexus and the DSP model as in e-commerce-type companies?
The ideal clients for AppNexus are companies like eBay who care about performance and leveraging data and
intelligence to capitalize on real-time advertising opportunities. Of course, eBay is well-known for being one of the
savviest and most forward-thinking companies in the industry and we're thrilled to be working with them. However,
we're serious about making companies successful who are serious about success themselves - we're not a great
solution for companies just looking to run a campaign or two.
How are you bridging the gap regarding services with your clients whether a direct advertiser or an
agency? Do they need to have a skilled in-house team or can AppNexus help?
AppNexus is first and foremost a technology platform company, though that platform is supported by the best client
services team in the industry. We have incredible in-house expertise across the board, and the executive team
pioneered the original ad exchanges at Right Media and DoubleClick. Our objective is to help make our partners
smarter so they can run independent businesses; we're not trying to built a permanent service-based appendage
to their businesses. Our goal is to help our clients adapt their businesses and capitalize on the opportunities
presented by the shifts and trends in the market.
What do you say to marketers (or creatives for that matter) concerned about their creative messaging
getting lost in the technological innovation represented by a company such as AppNexus?
Creative is one of the most important components of display advertising; we recognize that. Our goal at AppNexus
is to facilitate those much-needed one-on-one conversations with consumers on the creative level. We help
creative teams make decisions on the fly about how to optimize their campaigns, so we aim to play an integral role
with those goals, which is to achieve relevance to the audience. The combination of precise targeting and dynamic
creative is incredibly powerful.
A year from now, what milestones would you like to have seen AppNexus accomplish?
We exist to delight our clients with our offering. Our objective for the next year is to make sure that we help as
many clients as possible capitalize on the amazing opportunities presented by the growth of real-time advertising.
Those are the only milestones that matter to us.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 1, 2010 – 10:26 am
212
Publisher Ad Technology
aiMatch To Build Value In Direct And Third-Party Inventory
Says CEO Wood
Email This Post
March 25, 2010 – 8:21 am
Jeff Wood is CEO of aiMatch, a publisher selling solution for direct and unsold inventory.
AdExchanger.com: Looking back at your aQuantive/Accipiter
experiences, what key learnings will you bring forward to
aiMatch?
JW: First, our greatest achievements in our past experience(s)
came from being laser-focused on providing value to our
customers. We have to continue to listen to the evolving needs of
our customers and our industry, applying over 10 years of industry
expertise to deliver new innovations that help our customers
achieve results. Second, we have developed an integrated view of
the entire online advertising ecosystem. We are putting this
experience to work for our customers by providing a platform that
addresses a publisher’s business needs and enables them to bring
new value into the ecosystem.
Any challenges getting back into startup mode?
It certainly didn’t happen without moments of pause at the thought
of starting a new business in the current economy. But the key for
us is that we saw a huge need in the market, and we were able to
quickly put together an experienced team to address it. We were
fortunate to have access to many talented individuals with comprehensive knowledge of the industry and with
experience in the startup culture. Our biggest challenge now is to remain focused on our core objectives while at
the same time laying the foundation of a company capable of rapid growth.
What problem is aiMatch solving?
There has been great investment and innovation building value into the inventory that a publisher sells via third
parties, but more innovation is needed to build value into the inventory that publishers wish to sell directly. The
aiMatch solution gives the publisher the Advertising Intelligence (ai) needed to define, increase and optimally sell
inventory directly or through third parties.
Given the creation of demand-side platforms for advertisers, do you see aiMatch as the equivalent for
publishers? A supply or sell-side platform, if you will?
aiMatch delivers a single solution for publishers to create, forecast, deliver and analyze online media products sold
directly or through third parties.
How does aiMatch help with a publisher's data strategy?
213
Data is definitely a crucial factor in what drove us when we began architecting our new platform. We are delivering
an open, extensible platform to make the best use of both internal and external third-party data. Our solution
enables publishers to efficiently aggregate and leverage their data. We also provide the business intelligence to
analyze and act on that data.
Do you agree that - industry-wide - ad serving has been largely been commoditized? Why did this
happen? How will aiMatch overcome this perception?
We agree that ad serving technology prices have been pushed too low and that this has caused a slow-down in
innovation that isn’t serving publishers well. The other part of the equation that has squeezed technological
advancement is subsidization (the bartering of technology at a low price in exchange for inventory). Recent
feedback from publishers indicates they will gladly pay more for more value. Publishers see the value in paying for
the technology and keeping relationships between technology and inventory separate.
Do you think publishers should sell through ad networks and exchanges? If so, under what conditions?
We think the recent investment by ad network and exchange vendors is creating good value. We help our
publishers leverage those channels by providing the business intelligence required to make educated decisions
about networks and exchange strategies or any other channel they choose.
What about an aiMatch solution for real-time bidding (RTB) such as dynamic floor pricing?
We have defined goal, discounting and floor prices on products in our solution so that publishers can monitor and
manage rate cards. If our publisher clients want to make inventory available with dynamic floor pricing as a
solution to optimize their sales channels, we’re ready.
Can you see a future exchange someday that would include premium/reserved inventory? Under what
conditions?
Sure, and our focus is to make sure our publisher customers have the business intelligence tools to make
educated decisions on when to sell directly and when to sell through third parties.
A year from now, what milestones would you like to have seen aiMatch accomplish?
We expect to look back and see that our publishers increased the overall value of their inventory as a whole,
whether sold directly or through third parties. We expect that we will have helped them make better use of data
from both internal and external sources. We will have given them better insight into sales performance. And we
will have helped them become better focused (across the organization) on selling both products and audience.
Follow aiMatch (@aimatch) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 25, 2010 – 8:21 am
214
GM Burke Says FatTail Offering Supply-Side Platform
Solution
March 30, 2010 – 7:33 am
Doug Burke is General Manager of FatTail, an online advertising technology company.
AdExhchanger.com: How did FatTail begin?
DB: FatTail formed in 2001 to apply the tools and technologies of
financial trading systems to the data rich world of online
advertising. The founding team, which continues to lead the
market’s innovations, had extensive experience in advanced
trading systems of equity, bonds and derivatives and had built and
sold companies to SunGard and Cantor Fitzgerald. The term
FatTail, coined by Benoit Mandelbrot, IBM Fellow Emeritus and
Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Emeritus at Yale
University, describes how to understand and manage the real world
risk that typical mathematical models fail to capture. We are
helping our publisher clients manage their real world risks in
revolutionary ways.
What problem is FatTail trying to solve?
There is a brand new universe of electronic buying for guaranteed
inventory that can only be effectively serviced electronically. We
are helping our clients tap into this demand at lower costs. Our
solutions put publishers in full control of who they trade with, how
they price and whether they want to accept or reject the orders.
What advertising trends are you seeing from your clients
through Page Gage?
We have been watching the emergence of automated buying
systems and Demand Side Platforms (”DSPs”), and we designed and started building PageGage to protect and
automate our Publisher clients’ interests when transacting with these platforms.
We define demand side platforms as any buying system that wants to automate with our clients and they include 1)
agency systems, 2) local buying systems, and 3) direct response buying systems. The agencies have augmented
their buying expertise with DSPs and many have found their clients are NOT satisfied with the inventory available
on exchanges and want to buy premium, guaranteed inventory. Local advertising has its own group of new buying
systems.
PageGage is the premiere Supply Side Platform to provide automated connections to all these buying systems.
PageGage is ad server and order management system agnostic so it sits on a publisher’s existing IT infrastructure
with no ripping and replacing.
What's your view on the supply-side platform? Is this a necessity for the supply or sell-side going
forward?
Having a Supply Side Platform is an absolute necessity. Publishers’ who adopt one sooner will have advantages
over their competitors by opening up new sales channels, having better run internal operations including more
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efficient direct sales forces and ad operations teams, and automating access to their data both internally and
externally.
The publisher has been at great disadvantage as the investment in buying systems and demand side platforms
has outpaced publisher innovation during the recession. We are helping publishers catch up quickly.
Generally speaking, what do publishers need to start thinking about that they haven't been missing particularly given evolution of technology on the demand-side?
The evolution of demand side and supply side platforms will facilitate the creation of the Scatter Market, or
guaranteed, frequent small order near term buying. In traditional television media buying there is an Upfront, a
Scatter and a Spot Market. In the online world there has really only been an Upfront, sold by the Direct Sales team
of the publishers, and a Spot or remnant market served by Ad Networks and Exchanges. The evolution of
electronic buying and selling will introduce a Scatter Market to the online universe for buyers who are willing to pay
a premium over the Spot Market price.
Discuss the competitive set. Is it the yield optimizers? Is it ad networks?
The competitive set is Google. And Google is one of the industry’s biggest partners. However, publishers should
be very concerned about giving their bidding strategies, their sales pipeline and their contract information to
Google, one of their biggest competitors for ad dollars. It was one thing to let Doubleclick manage this data. It is
very different when Google is the vendor. The publisher risk is that several years from now the online publisher
may wake up and discover that their revenue and margins have fallen greatly while Google’s have expanded
greatly.
Regarding yield optimizers, unfortunately Microsoft Rapt and SAS have not delivered the very desirable goal of
yield optimization and have left customers fearful. Both products have led to high fixed cost, entrenched
infrastructures that are expensive to operate and maintain and hard to adapt or change as market conditions
evolve. Instead of automating their clients, these solutions clogged their data arteries. These are yesterday’s
enterprise software solutions addressing today’s problems.
In our opinion, yield optimization needs to be achieved with affordable and variable cost solutions that deliver
actionable data in real-time to salespeople and buyers. These solutions need to be delivered by Software As A
Service (SAAS) vendors who can achieve the economies of scale and innovation by selling across the industry.
The yield optimization functions need to be easily managed by internal ad operations teams without the need for
large IT staffs to service them. The ad sales team and their customers need to see real-time actionable data. They
need it anytime, anywhere. That is what PageGage is delivering to the market.
Ad networks in general are dealing with the remnant inventory that the direct sales efforts failed to sell. So while
optimizing the results in selling to ad networks can have an impact, it pales in comparison to the results from
optimizing the premium guaranteed sales process. Helping our customers sell more inventory directly at high
CPMs on an automated basis will have a far greater impact than helping them increase the pennies that ad
networks can produce.
How is transparency playing into FatTail's product strategy, i.e. advertisers want more of it regarding the
inventory they are buying?
PageGage is a fully transparent system for publishers to manage their sales channels. We put the publisher fully in
control of where, how and when they expose their inventory and pricing to the market.
What's your view on a futures exchange for digital advertising? Is a Wall Street-look possible for digital
advertising?
The sale of premium, guaranteed inventory is inherently a “future” or “forward” sale. In order for an exchange to
succeed, a significant group of buyers and sellers must agree to meet electronically and transact according to
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standardized terms. The process is not electronic and still very manual. It is non-standardized and, in spite of
efforts by the IAB to create standards, the internet facilitates the continuous creation of new digital advertising
formats. The contractual cancellation policies of the industry also prevent a viable futures exchange.
In spite of those barriers, we believe that a futures market for guaranteed inventory for standard ad products can
and will evolve. A futures market is far more complex than the spot market exchanges because, among other
factors, there are the extra dimensions of time and overlapping inventory. In our opinion, the futures market for
display advertising inventory is going to resemble the transaction network buying experience of travel where you
can visit online Travelocity, Orbitz, Expedia, Kayak, American Airlines, Southwest, Delta, United Airlines or even
call up your travel agent if you value their help highly.
A year from now, what milestones would you like to have seen FatTail accomplish?
We would like PageGage to be the most widely used and most trusted Supply Side Platform for online publishers
to manage guaranteed inventory. We are given enormous trust every day and every second by our clients, and we
strive hard to earn that trust on an ongoing basis through innovation and careful consideration of our publisher
clients’ goals and objectives.
Follow Doug Burke (@DougBurke) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 30, 2010 – 7:33 am
217
Yieldbot To Offer Publishers Control Of Their Data Says
Mendez
March 24, 2010 – 7:34 am
Jonathan Mendez is the founder of Yieldbot, a publisher-side
analytics and targeting platform.
AdExchanger.com: What problem is Yieldbot solving?
JM: The market problem as I’ve blogged about is the delta between
the true value of publisher’s digital media and the return they get
from it. It is an inequitable and unsustainable allocation of media
dollars. I don’t think this will ever be fixed in display under the
current paradigm. Advertisers have no incentive and Publishers are
not digital marketers or technologists.
The publisher problem is that they’re sitting on a treasure trove of
data from their visitors and content but they are doing nothing with
it that substantively increases revenues. Yieldbot solves this.
Yieldbot is natively an analytics technology that plugs-in between a
publisher site analytics and an ad server. Yieldbot immediately
makes publisher content more valuable by creating layers of data
intelligence around visitor interest and intent that is far more
actionable, to far more advertisers, for far longer than current third
party data or legacy display solutions.
What's Yieldbot's target market? When will this become widely available?
Our initial market is the 3,000 sites in the United States that get more than 500,000 unique visitors a month though
as we continue to build out we will be able to work with any sized publisher. Right now we have 20 publishers in
our queue and we’re cherry picking our beta pubs so we can learn initial optimization lessons from a cross-section
of publishers. We’re in no rush to scale. Our focus is on tuning the performance of the product first and learning the
needs of publishers.
Who's in the competitive set (AdMeld, PubMatic, Rubicon Project)? How do you differentiate?
We believe that Yieldbot is revolutionary. Our ultimate goal is nothing less than creating a new channel for
publishers focused on performance. None of what we are doing is possible as second or third party solutions or
with existing network optimizers or site analytics systems. We are completely empowering publishers by adding a
layer of unequaled actionable intelligence to the stack so publishers can own and control the data but advertisers
can leverage it. Advertisers don’t care about data. Data is just a tool for them, but for publishers it is their lifeblood.
One way we enable pubs to build revenue streams is through better SEO. We also can help them valuate every
visitor so ultimately they can arbitrage their own traffic rather than having someone else do it and take all the
vigorish. We envision some of our publishers even buying Search traffic to arb through Yieldbot. In essence, we’ve
flipped the value chain by allowing publishers to embrace and leverage getting Search & Social traffic by
appending data and finding the right ad match that makes it high value.
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Discuss the intersection of search and display with your product. In your opinion, where in the funnel is
the opportunity that Yieldbot creates?
While there has been growing search & display convergence in buying platforms I look at Yieldbot as the first ad
matching technology inspired by search & dynamic landing page optimization.
Yieldbot has two main components. First is the Segmentation Engine. Data is fed to us from the publisher’s Site
Analytics API (Yieldbot is compatible with most major site analytics such as Google Analytics & Omniture Site
Catalyst). Based on the unique characteristics of each publisher’s content and audience Yieldbot dynamically
creates actionable and high value segments to match ads against. An unlimited amount of segments can be
created based on every major piece of site analytics data collected. While the segmentation roll-ups and targeting
rules are fully automated the creation of segments can be 100% marketer, advertiser or publisher controlled based
on the needs to reach a specific visitor, audience or performance metric.
The second main component is our Rules Engine that controls the Intelligent Ad Serving. As visitor events qualify
them for segments Yieldbot’s intelligent ad server technology delivers the event-driven ad serving rules. Yieldbot
has integrated ad server functionality but is also compatible with OpenX, DFP and other third-party ad servers.
Since even the best data and segments need validation and testing Yieldbot has a pattern recognition engine to
continually optimize the segmentation and ad matching rules. The system also has built in A/B & Multivariate
testing for creative as well as targeted ad sequencing.
As far as the funnel, data can be shaped to help any type of campaign. We’re built to drive actions, engagement,
clicks, sign-ups, everywhere and anywhere doing that will bring higher revenues to publishers. There’s not a
publisher or advertiser I’ve spoken with over the past year that couldn’t find a good use case for Yieldbot.
What about retargeting the users that Yieldbot sees through exchanges and DSPs? Is this a future
iteration? And do you see publisher ad networks as a significant publisher strategy going forward?
I’m not a big fan of the scaling attributes of retargeting or for that matter the cookie economy as a whole (as I’ve
written about here). Cookie sharing has fleeting temporal value and major privacy issues. I do see a possibility of
bringing the publisher segments directly into the exchanges.
I believe the publisher destiny as networks, DSPs agencies, or whatever the new forms they will have to take –
that their success will depend on the performance of their media, the performance of the media will depend on
relevance matching and relevance matching will depend on actionable data. We will be there to help every step of
the way.
How does the revenue model work for Yieldbot?
Yieldbot is being launched as a managed platform. Yieldbot’s publisher optimizers create the segments, match ads
and manage performance optimization. Functionally the interface is similar to AdWords so that someone familiar
with SEM would feel right at home using the system. Yieldbot is 100% aligned with getting the highest revenue for
our publishers working as a true revenue share partner rather than a more opaque optimizer.
Yieldbot is completely transparent. Publishers can log onto the system and see all site segmentation, impressions,
click data and revenue statistics. Publishers at any time can see the ads and creative being served to a particular
segment. Yieldbot can also work with the publishers own ads server to optimize direct buys and custom
integrations by adding a level a targeting rules and ad performance heretofore unavailable. Our success is our
publisher’s success and our publisher’s success is our success.
Follow Yieldbot (@yieldbot) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 24, 2010 – 7:34 am
219
ZEDO Optimizing Publishers’ Ad Networks And Providing
Self-Serve Platform Says CEO de Souza
April 23, 2010 – 12:47 am
Roy de Souza is CEO of ZEDO, an advertising technology
company.
AdExchanger.com: One of the complaints about ad serving in
general is the lack of innovation over the years. What's your
view?
RS: You are right - ad serving did lack innovation for many years.
However ZEDO has heard the demands of publishers', and is
innovating to meet their specific needs. As the largest independent
ad server and advertising technology provider, ZEDO released 22
new versions of its user interface and ad delivery platform last year
and has released it's 7th update this year. Our large research and
development teams, and dedication to innovate for publishers has
lead to new features including: a full ad network optimization
system in the ad server, a self service feature for the advertisers to
buy directly from a publisher's site, ad serving for ads in iphone
apps, reporting on the iphone, reporting by sms, unique new
formats like sliders and much more. ZEDO is now the only ad server with an ad network optimization and a self
service platform built into it. So at ZEDO, innovation is back and strong.
What problem is (or problems are) ZEDO looking to solve today?
ZEDO's a technology provider to premium publishers like newspapers. But more than that ZEDO aims to be an
technology partner - for publishers. It will provide any technology or service that will help them increase revenue.
Publishers are looking for self service platforms to allow smaller advertisers to buy from their sites (Alexa.com and
Friendster are ZEDO customers), and they are looking for ad network optimization (ZEDO technology is used by
lots of newspapers). Publishers are also looking for ways to get local advertising onto their sites, unique rich media
formats for their direct sales teams, behavioral data built into the ad server (ZEDO has eXelate data built in),
inventory forecasting that really works, and better ways to see which ad network served a particular ad on their site
(ZEDO's AdMagic Firefox plugin is a leader).
What are some key trends you're seeing on the client-side today which you expect to gain momentum in
the future?
Today, publishers are much more serious about making money. Newspapers and TV station sites are not happy
with having tiny revenues compared to their offline properties. They are now willing to take faster and bolder
decisions on new formats, new ways of selling and new technologies to support this. ZEDO customers like CBS
reach out more for new technologies - and ZEDO builds them. Newspapers in particular want a technology partner.
Yahoo tried to provide this but didn't make progress, as they had many distractions. ZEDO is now taking over and
doing well because we are focused solely on being a publisher's advertising technology partner. That is all we do
and we love doing it and seeing publisher revenues grow.
How is the increasingly data-driven, media buying process changing your business?
Data-driven media buying (behavioral and demographic) is a good potential revenue stream for publishers. We
help publishers sell these difficult to find but valuable impressions at a good CPM in two ways. First we aggregate
the impressions across publishers, ensure high CTRs by finding only the first impressions per user on the site, and
we add data then we sell these impressions ad networks on behalf of the publisher. We don't sell to agencies - just
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to ad networks. Second, we have a new self service platform where small advertisers can buy these aggregated,
first impressions with eXelate data. It is at www.zedoadnetwork.com. By selling aggregated data driven
impressions to both small advertisers and to ad networks - that sell to agencies - and by keeping a high floor CPM
we make the most revenue possible for publishers.
How big a problem is malvertising? Is more of a problem for advertisers or publishers and what is ZEDO
doing to help its clients in this area?
This is a big problem for publishers. They just don't want it on their sites under any circumstances. ZEDO has a big
effort underway in this area. We started by scanning everything uploaded into our system including java script and
flash creative. Now as a second step we certify all third party urls that are uploaded into our system. If an ad
network that is certified serves malware they have a financial penalty to pay and after 3 infractions they are decertified and their ad tags can't be uploaded into ZEDO. This upsets some ad networks immensely but it protects
publishers. We also use third party companies to scan our tags and have a new feature in our system that allows a
publisher to visually see 100+ creative that any ad network is serving anywhere in the world. We believe in
openess and share information that we find with others. Our blogging on the steps we have taken to counter
malware has been well received.
What's your competitive set? Are you concerned that Google will take over the ad serving world? Or does
OpenX provide a threat, for example?
ZEDO as the largest independent publisher ad server doing the most new development and is therefore very well
placed in the reinvigorated market. Competitor ad servers are part of companies whose major revenue is from
selling advertising. These companies are more interested in lowering prices to win advertisers than building
technologies for publishers.We have big development teams solely to meet publisher's advertising technology
needs. Competitors won't and can't build anything resembling our technology products for big publishers. When
publishers really need an advertising technology partner for their business they choose ZEDO.
11 years as CEO and ZEDO's co-founder - if you could do anything over again regarding guiding the
company, what would it be?
Two things: first I should have focused the company solely on premium publishers much earlier. Second I should
have hired some senior publisher execs onto the ZEDO management team so that we knew their problems better
and could solve them. However we did may things right and I am happiest that we did not sell despite several
written offers 3 years go. Since then we have invested in various new tools for publishers and learning about
publishers needs and wants. Now with the demand for technology driven innovation, integrations with DSPs and
data driven advertising, ZEDO is taking a new leadership role in the industry.
Where do you see the company growing in the next 12 months? Any key market opportunities or targets
that you would like to see Zedo achieve?
We are growing revenue fast for ZEDO and for publishers. In the next year I want to take over as the key
technology partner for online newspapers, TV stations and other premium sites. ZEDO will help them get real
revenue. The time has come for online divisions to be proud of the revenue they earn.
Follow ZEDO (@zedoadsolutions) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
April 23, 2010 – 12:47 am
221
Privacy Regulation
Better Advertising Will Create More Trust Between
Consumers, Companies And The Government Says CEO
Meyer
January 25, 2010 – 5:47 am
Scott Meyer is CEO of Better Advertising, a company focused on provide a
solution for privacy self-regulation for the online advertising industry.
AdExchanger.com: Please discuss your background and how it brings
you to where you are today.
SM: I've been in the digital media business since 1998, including eight
years with The New York Times Company where I was CEO of About.com
and also General Manager of NYTimes.com. Before the Times Company,
ran the consumer business at Multex, which was a successful IPO and is
now owned by Reuters.
So, I know first-hand what some of the pressures are on our industry,
including the role privacy concerns play in how major brands allocate their
digital media dollars.
What problem is Better Advertising solving?
There is an immediate need for self-regulation to succeed. The Principles
put out by the cross-Industry Coalition have to be successfully
implemented. Better Advertising simplifies and makes that process
scalable. The larger ongoing problem we solve is creating more trust in the online advertising ecosystem between
consumers, companies and the government. This current lack of trust leads many brands to stay on the sidelines,
missing out on great marketing opportunities, such as Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA). Multiple studies show
that many millions of new branding dollars would come online if privacy concerns weren't so severe. A recent study
by Forbes found that 77% of brand marketers are worried about the privacy concerns with OBA. That is clearly
keeping dollars out of the market.
AdExchanger.com: Why is it relevant to the audience buying world of today where buyers have moved
from placement to people?
That is where this is most relevant. The only way buyers can identify people rather than using placement as a
proxy is through OBA. If self-regulation fails and data collection and use, principally through cookies and trackers,
becomes more restricted, buyers will have very few good options to target people effectively. It will look a lot more
like the world of 10 years ago. At the same time, data collection and use need to be made transparent to the user,
as well as to the buyer. If it isn't made transparent, self-regulation won't be given another chance to succeed.
Without self-regulation, our industry's standards will be left to others in Washington - an eventuality I think we'd
rather prevent than predict.
Why buy Ghostery? What is the potential here for BA?
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With this acquisition, Better Advertising now brings to bear a new kind of panel that will uniquely enable the
company to have a complete view of OBA usage for companies that both do and do not observe the OBA
Principles.
More than 2M users have downloaded Ghostery onto their browsers, with 11,000 new downloads each week, all
driven solely by word-of-mouth. 300,000 of these users have opted-in to join the GhostRank panel, which has
identified more than 200 OBA companies gathering data across more than 4.5M sites. GhostRank is adding 2,500
users per week out of the 11,000 new downloads. GhostRank users actively contribute data on their web behavior
and contribute new rules and trackers to Ghostery when they find them. It enables the most privacy-savvy and
active 300,000 people online to become an active panel. Through this acquisition, Better Advertising can crowdsource this panel for insights on OBA. The Ghostery acquisition makes the platform we are proposing to the crossindustry coalition truly unique and robust, and will enable us to identify the good and bad actors more readily than
anyone else in the business, which will help our industry continue to self-regulate.
AdExchanger.com: What's your view on the ad exchange model? How will it fit with Better Advertising's
future?
My co-founder, Ed Kozek, was the 5th employee at Right Media. We both deeply understand and support the role
of Exchanges in the digital buying ecosystem. Buyers and sellers will need to make their data use and collection
transparent to consumers and to each other. This transparency is a core service of Better Advertising's platform.
AdExchanger.com: What do you see from the brand marketer now or in the future that will speak to the
Better Advertising product line?
Our industry's largest and most influential digital agencies (WPP, Omnicom, IPG, Publicis and Havas) are working
closely with us as Design Partners.
They see self-regulation as essential to their future and to the future of the brand marketers they serve. Agencies
and advertisers will need a service to monitor, deliver and prove their compliance with the Principles. Without
effective compliance services, it will be much harder and costlier to take advantage of OBA, and to use agency
demand-side platforms to do so. Better Advertising's Assurance Platform is custom-built for this need. These
partners are committed to getting this right so that they can utilize this
medium toward its potential.
Any thoughts on how consumer privacy legislation in the U.S. will play out? Or recent legislative efforts in
the E.U.?
No - the legislative situation in Congress is still coming into focus. We see the regulatory actions from the FTC,
either with or without legislation, as having a more substantial impact. However, the mission of Better Advertising is
to keep the effects from either regulatory or legislative efforts from slowing the growth of our industry.
How do you see the large, web publisher evolving in the next few years - especially in regards to
transparency?
If that publisher isn't providing simple, clear transparency to each of its users, they will under-perform publishers
who do. They will be short on consumer and brand trust, and they will also be limited in taking advantage of
exchanges and network advertising to sell their inventory. Consumers and regulatory forces will push them in this
direction.
Finally, creativity. How does Better Advertising affect creativity - whether a creative agency or creating
compelling advertising?
This is a great question - especially since a major complaint of our industry is that it's impossible to make anyone
cry with a banner ad. The promise of interactive advertising resides in its interactivity. If this interactivity with
consumers is managed transparently, the sky is the limit for our medium - so I would say that the success of Better
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Advertising should increase the growth of great creative targeted to the right consumer, in a privacy-safe way. That
will drive revenues for marketers and drive growth in digital media.
Follow Scott Meyer (@scottmeyer), Better Advertising (@betterads) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on
Twitter.
January 25, 2010 – 5:47 am
224
Research
Winterberry Group Releases Brand Safety Report – It’s Not
Necessarily About Full Transparency For Marketers
April 14, 2010 – 3:22 pm
AdSafe Media sponsored a new white paper by Winterberry
Group called, "Beyond the Grey Areas: Transparency, Brand
Safety and the Future of Online Advertising." Looking at brand
safety concerns across the industry, Winterberry Group notes
it's not so much that full transparency is the important issue for
marketers, but its that they feel safe distributing their brand
throughout the Web - there is a difference! Read Winterberry
Group's release. And, download the PDF.
Jonathan Margulies, a director at Winterberry Group discussed the paper's findings.
AdExchanger.com: On the buy-side, specifically agency, do you sense confusion among buyers of brand
safety "tools"? Or is it pretty cut and dry?
There's no question that agencies--and most brands, for that matter--are still sorting through the market of potential
brand safety solutions. But the confusion is much deeper with respect to the problem itself. And how can we
expect buyers to make informed decisions about tools or services when, by and large, they don't yet fully
understand the extent the costs they're already incurring? That was one of the principal drivers of this research,
and our hope is that putting some context to the current roadblocks--that is, tying some tangible costs to the vast
array of anecdotal feedback associated with brand safety issues--will help buyers, sellers and intermediaries
address the problem more effectively.
When it comes to brand safety solutions--and I'd argue that encompasses a broad combination of rating services,
filtering tools and other custom applications--it seems that many on the buy-side are adopting the approach that
"more is better," and covering themselves through affiliation with as many legitimate providers as they can (and as
many as their clients are likely to require). But that's something we expect will change somewhat as the contrasts
between platforms grow more distinct--and the tools available to track their respective value grow more useful. At
the end of the day, that's ultimately what's going to drive adoption.
What are one or two insights that surprised you the most?
For all our preconceptions about the potential obstacles associated with the brand safety issue, the sheer
magnitude of opportunity cost really took us aback. In a U.S. display advertising market that still has yet to
generate $10 billion in annual investment, $2 billion in lost opportunity is equal to nearly a quarter of all spending-obviously a significant share. And that requires participants in display advertising to deal with these challenges
now, if the channel is going to fulfill the promise that so many are banking on.
Beyond that, we were awakened--"surprised" is probably not the right word--by the extent to which various parties
in the display ecosystem suggested that responsibility for addressing these issues should rest with other
constituencies. I'm overgeneralizing a bit, but agencies would invariably suggest this issue should be a
responsibility of ad networks. Ad networks shifted the burden to publishers. Publishers acknowledged a certain
responsibility, but would note that the issue rolls right back to advertisers, demand-side platforms and agencies. In
the end, we came out to two fundamental conclusions that I think make a lot of sense: The potential financial
opportunity inherent in successfully addressing these issues is significant, and that solution is likely to come from
one or more independent providers who won't be conflicted by the natural buy- or sell-side interests confronting the
rest of the industry.
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Can you comment on the difference between the brand safety concerns of a brand advertiser who's
driving awareness and a direct response marketer?
In fact, the concerns echoed by brand and direct response marketers didn't differ much at all. That's because, we
believe, the nature of the problem--a fundamental risk that one's brand or message may be undermined by
surrounding page content--simply doesn't discriminate between advertiser, publisher or strategic intent. By
contrast, we heard vastly different feedback from advertisers across vertical markets. In those markets where trust
is a fundamental hallmark of the brand--think pharmaceuticals, food/beverage and certain financial services
disciplines--the understanding of and concerns associated with brand safety issues are significantly more
advanced than those in some other markets. In those cases, it's not so much that advertisers don't recognize the
problem; they're just not as susceptible to meaningful brand damage.
For illustration, we've often used the contrasting example of a drugmaker and an apparel manufacturer--one is
marketing, say, an over-the-counter children's remedy; the other a hot new sneaker line targeted at a young
audience. Brand integrity is crucial in both cases. But if the drugmaker's ad shows up in the wrong place--and you
can imagine there are lots of wrong places in this instance--the marketer may find itself exposed to a host of
issues, ranging from embarrassment to lost consumer confidence to even regulatory sanction. The sneaker
marketer, on the other hand, is more likely to chalk up the issue as a lost opportunity. The truth, of course, is that
the long-term costs run deeper--and the challenge is in helping advertisers and agencies recognize those costs-but there remains a fundamental difference in "danger factor" between verticals that's not likely to change.
By John Ebbert
April 14, 2010 – 3:22 pm
226
Targeting Technology
OpenAmplify CEO Redgrave Discusses Brand Engagement
With Semantic Technology
February 18, 2010 – 8:32 am
OpenAmplify recently announced research which showed that by using
the company's semantic technology, it was able to discover
engagement levels for certain brand ads - such as Audi ads after the
Super Bowl, in this case. Read the release.
Mark Redgrave, CEO of OpenAmplify, discussed the findings with
AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: Are brands such as Audi requesting this
information from OpenAmplify, yet? How is your semantic
technology critical here?
MR: No. We ran the research out of general interest. Semantic technology is able to tell us how engaged people
are, and what topics they are engaging in. We understand the conversation that is occurring - what people like and
dislike, and their actionable and emotional engagement to the ads and how it compares to the brand.
It's interesting that your data speaks to attribution modeling and ROI for brands. Can you see
OpenAmplify's data used for this purpose? Any plans to productize?
We are proving that the OpenAmplify semantic platform can power the next generation of intelligent applications
that deliver unique and valuable insights. We are running projects for agencies and brands in both U.S. and U.K.,
which we hope to announce soon.
How do you translate engagement given the context of the site? For example, people might be more prone
to talk about a car ad on a car buyer site.. but if they talk about it on Facebook - that could be more or less
valuable depending on any number of factors.
True, although in the current state of the industry, brands want a big picture first to get a better sense if they are
resonating with consumers overall. In this example, we wanted to establish a benchmark for comparison. We
decided to track reactions and engagement across the major social media platforms because that is where most
brands and clients are focused. We track how the reactions spread in various channels and also how the brand is
being talked about. "What's happening to my brand on Twitter? Or Digg? Or YouTube?" By concentrating on
these, we are satisfying the focus of the brand majority.
By John Ebbert
February 18, 2010 – 8:32 am
227
Resonate Networks CEO Gernert On Attitudinal Versus
Demographic, Psychographic Targeting
April 12, 2010 – 4:52 pm
Ad technology company, Resonate Networks, announced today that
in its own study, attitudinal targeting showed up to a 4x lift when
compared to demographic targeting. Read the release.
Resonate Networks' CEO Bryan Gernert discussed the finer points of
attitudinal targeting.
Where does attitudinal targeting fit within psychographic
targeting (PeerSet, Mindset Media) and behavioral targeting?
Attitudinal targeting is similar to psychographic targeting in that we
identify audiences based on personal characteristics, such as
attitudes and values, which influence consumer purchase decisions.
Targeting based on attitudes and values offers advertisers the
opportunity to connect with consumers on a deeper more enduring
level than demographic or behavioral targeting especially since
behaviors can be fleeting while attitudes tend to remain relatively consistent. Online behavioral targeting today
uses purchase intent and search data which is not scalable and doesn’t address the “why” – the motivating factors
behind consumer purchase decisions, brand loyalty, etc. Without understanding the why advertisers would have a
hard time developing brand advertising strategies to drive demand of specific brands, products or services. We do
incorporate demographic and behavioral targeting in our methodology when it is beneficial to an advertisers
strategy and goals.
Resonate is different from companies like PeerSet and Mindset Media in several ways. While some other players
are focused on inferring psychographic information about individuals based upon keywords used or usergenerated content, Resonate directly collects attitudinal information from individuals to drive our predictive
targeting model. Our methodology includes continuous, large scale waves of consumer research. This approach
allows us to get far more precise in understanding more sophisticated and nuanced attitudes, values and beliefs
that would be too difficult to infer from online activity. Other players offer advertisers limited Prizm-like cluster
segmentation models but Resonate offers advertisers the ability to define their target audience from a combination
of over one thousand characteristics.
How does the increasingly real-time nature of targeting in online display work with attitudinal targeting?
Trying to understand why attitudinal works, in particular...
Attitudinal targeting is most effective when used for brand advertising vs. direct response because it enables
brands to identify an audience based on attributes that define people on a more emotional level than price or
product features. Our targeting engine enables advertisers to reach a highly targeted audience with audiencespecific messaging which delivers effective ROI since the advertising is reaching the right audience with the right
message as many times as desired (targeted reach & frequency). When you define an audience by attitudinal
characteristics, as opposed to behavioral targeting on purchase intent for example, we’ve found that the online
behavior of that audience changes slowly; so you can draw meaningful conclusions about how to find specialized
audiences online by analyzing recent historical online behavior and applying this knowledge on campaigns in real
time.
Resonate provides advertisers premium ad placement in brand-safe environments by buying inventory directly
from publishers. Currently real time bidding is ideal for DR campaigns that leverage remnant inventory; these
platforms are not particularly useful for executing brand campaigns that require premium placements from
advertisers, which is why Resonate maintains its over 1,300 direct publisher relationships today.
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What are the keys to effective creative when using attitudinal targeting?
As with any advertising - online or offline – creative, message and targeting are all critical to an ad campaign’s
effectiveness. Resonate’s powerful analytic tools provide valuable insights for advertisers to better understand the
needs and interests of their audience and leverage these insights for strategic creative and messaging decisions
that help them connect with their target audience.
The most powerful aspect of attitudinal targeting is that most Resonate clients end up turning one target audience
into multiple sub-audiences within a single campaign – Attitudinal Targeting allows you to begin to think in this
more precise way, and develop messaging and creative that hit on the emotional motivations of each particular
group distinctly.
You touched a bit on this in your release - What about blending attitudinal and demographic targeting?
Could this add a layer of improved optimization? Or does this inhibit scale?
Yes, when it makes sense we incorporate additional targeting attributes like demographic characteristics into our
attitudinal targeting and audience delivery. Since demographic attributes are more coarse descriptors of audience
than the core attitudes and beliefs, they can be useful in defining sub-audiences to target. For example, I may want
to deliver one message to those Moms concerned about childhood obesity who are in their mid 40s – 50s; I may
want to deliver a very different message to those Moms concerned about childhood obesity who are in their late
20s – 30s. Same attitudinal target, refined by a demographic to reach each sub-group in the optimal way. Our goal
is deliver the best audience to scale based on an advertiser’s goal.
By John Ebbert
April 12, 2010 – 4:52 pm
229
Resonate Networks CEO Gernert On Attitudinal Targeting
February 5, 2010 – 12:04 am
Resonate Networks announced that it has launched attitudinal targeting in
release on Wednesday.
a
AdExchanger.com discussed the new targeting capabilities with Resonate
Networks' CEO Bryan Gernert.
AdExchanger.com: Given the rich sources of social data available
today, how important is social media to creating Resonate's
dataset? Or, is it important?
BG: While social data is important for advertisers in terms of ensuring
your brand, service or product is involved in the real-time conversations
within social media channels, attitudes, values and beliefs are at the core of consumers' actions, brand affinities,
purchase behavior and media consumption. That said, data on audiences' attitudes is invaluable to marketers and
outweighs social information. Advertisers who leverage attitudinal data are able to connect with audiences on a
deeper, more enduring level.
Considering your familiarity with your attitudinal targeting product, it might make sense for Resonate to
develop its own media business, where it buys on behalf of clients? Any plans in this area?
Resonate's Attitudinal Targeting does include placing the media buys. Here's how it works, clients come to us with
their campaign goals and target audience, we work with them to identify additional audiences that deliver on their
strategy based on our research and data. We then use our proprietary Quality Visitation Indices(tm) to identify the
best online properties to deliver the highest concentration of the desired target audience. Once the media plan is in
place we work directly with these sites to deliver our clients advertising to highly targeted audiences through the
most precise online media. Essentially we connect advertisers to consumers with a precision not otherwise
possible.
What about the shelf life of attitudinal data? How long does it work? And how "real-time" is your attitudinal
targeting?
Actually attitudinal data doesn't have a short shelf life because consumers' values remain relatively consistent.
Traditional targeting and data don't allow for advertisers to understand audiences in the same profound manner
that attitudinal targeting and data allow. People's attitudes do change over time but at a much slower pace than
their purchase & search behavior. With each wave or our continual research we add new, valuable data so we not
only know why consumers make decisions but our data and methodology enable us to identify trends and shifts in
audience attitudes over time. Think about it this way, Contextual targeting is based mostly on intuition (i.e. people
who frequently visit SierraClub.com are environmentalists), while Behavioral Targeting is based upon assumptions
(if Joe Smith searches for a camera and/or is on an electronics site he is interested in buying a camera). These
types of targeting have their place and value, however knowing why people make decisions and tapping into
audiences that identify with brands based on attitudes, orientations and beliefs - key elements that shape purchase
behavior and brand relationship - position advertisers to develop long-term, successful connections with desired
audiences. Research is at the heart of what we do but we're not a research company, we connect advertisers with
highly targeted audiences to deliver the most effective campaigns.
By John Ebbert
February 5, 2010 – 12:04 am
230
Social Targeting And Marketing
Europe Ahead In Mobile And Creative, But Behind In Rich
Media, Video And Data Says VP van den Heuvel of
Amsterdam-based eBuddy
March 1, 2010 – 9:28 am
Rogier van den Heuvel is VP, Worldwide Sales, of messaging service and
Amsterdam-based, eBuddy.
AdExchanger.com: What's the startup culture like in Europe - even
Amsterdam, specifically? Are there hotspots? (i.e. like Silicon Valley
in California) Is creating interest with venture capital firms a
challenge?
There is a thriving start up culture in Europe including tech, software,
internet and mobile companies. These include: Layar, Distimo and
eBuddy in Amsterdam; Amiando in Munich; TweetDeck and Flirtomatic in
London; Vente-privee.com and Jolicloud in Paris; Spotify in Stockholm,
and many other examples of European start-up success stories. There is
not truly one European hotspot for Internet start-ups, although some might
say that Scandinavia was at the forefront of Internet connectivity. They
were able to get people online quickly and ad spend there was among the
first countries to surpass traditional media such as TV.
London is a media center and hub but it’s also rather expensive to live
and work there, so setting up a business somewhere else like Amsterdam, Berlin or Copenhagen can be an
equally good or better option for a number of companies. London is typically the starting point for a number of US
based companies who want to make the step across the Atlantic into Europe, and certainly a part of this can be
attributed to the fact that English is their shared common language.
The economy also continues to grow more and more global. We’ve found that it is equally important for European
startups to build strong ties and good business connections with companies and business people in Silicon Valley
and the APAC region.
What online advertising trends are you seeing today in eBuddy's business?
eBuddy is exceptionally strong in brand campaigns that target tech-savvy 15 – 25 year olds who want to be online
all the time on their PC and mobile devices. Entertainment (like DVD, movies, games), FMCG and mobile brands
are all doing very well at reaching our audience. In those sectors, we’ve seen strong growth and demand for rich
media, video banners and integrated solutions like homepage and messenger takeovers. There is clearly a
movement towards greater consumer engagement.
Overall, CPM pricing has become pretty stable over the course of the past quarter. We see a trend in moving
towards adding value to the inventory, through ad exchanges, network optimizers and data/audience networks or
exchanges. Impressions that previously were thought to carry little value can be injected with added value when
combined with audience targeting data. Data exchanges pull demographic and behavioral data on those same
consumers from many more sites to fill in the blanks and create a more complete user profile. Advertisers are
becoming more and more interested in buying pockets of unique users instead of just buying buckets of ad
impressions, and this equates to better CTR optimization.
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A deal size for eBuddy depends a lot on the country. We see higher deal sizes overall because we are able to
combine both web and mobile advertising campaigns and add in multiple countries or regions. Plus, we can make
global deals because we have users in more than 200 countries.
Is there a difference between the trends eBuddy may see as a web browser-based instant messaging
service versus a more traditional web publisher such as a news website?
The biggest difference is content or in eBuddy’s case, the lack of it. Where content is expensive and can be
crippling for a business, eBuddy has the ability to explore other avenues that are equally lucrative. eBuddy’s core
business revolves around its tens of millions of users, and eBuddy continuously increases its user numbers across
the globe month-over-month and year-over-year. This is done by constantly improving the central part of the
service you provide, and in our case, it is web and mobile instant messaging. Our users want to communicate
more and more often, so the engagement and online time spent on eBuddy messenger is very high. We can even
reach the same user multiple times on both our web and mobile platforms. It’s critical for us to target based on
research and our end user demographics instead of based on content. By doing so and working together with good
strategic partners, we are able to ensure that we are displaying only the best performing campaigns to our users.
Another difference is that most web publishers or news sites are regional and not globally focused. Technology
continues to make the world increasingly smaller and our ability to reach a global audience is absolutely a big
competitive advantage.
What do you see at the next big thing in online advertising technology?
On mobile: In-application advertising, location based advertising and augmented reality advertising.
On the Web: Larger display ad formats designed to promote creativity among advertisers and encourage Internet
users to actively share ads.
On social network aggregators: A place for all your various social networks, i.e. one inbox/place to keep in contact
with all your various social media networks or friends. (Much like what eBuddy does with aggregating of your
instant messaging networks, but then for all your social networks.)
What's your view on display advertising? Does it work?
I believe branding works especially when we talk about sponsorship packages. Display advertising can create new
insights into a user if this is expending his interests. The way to achieve this is via proper targeting and truly
“knowing” the end user. There was previously a lack on information about the end users. Display is not dead
though, and it will develop further this year once we are able to match the consumer’s interests with banner
advertising. It is something that has been tried in the last year or two, however 2010 is the year it will finally work.
Any thoughts regarding the differences in digital advertising between Europe and the U.S.?
The EU is a bit behind with the newest developments on the web front. Mobile advertising however, seems to be
taken more seriously in Europe than it is in the US.
The EU was behind when it came to rich media, video, and now data and statistics. Some of the best creative still
comes out of Europe though.
Europe typically sees less advertising information compared to the U.S. The most important reports and surveys
are typically focused on and have detailed information about the U.S market, although this is starting to change.
Follow Rogier van den Heuvel (@rheuvel), eBuddy (@ebuddy) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 1, 2010 – 9:28 am
232
Hooked Media Group Looking To Address Publisher Model
With Yoo-Mee Says CEO Uppal
February 23, 2010 – 4:47 pm
Hooked Media Group announced in a release that it has launched
Yoo-Me, "a premium gaming technology platform" that it hopes will
create a compelling, publisher monetization solution given the
influence of social media today.
Prita Uppal, CEO of Hooked Media Group, discussed the
announcement with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: What is broken with the publishing model which Hooked Media is fixing?
Uppal: Today's media consumption on publisher sites is extremely fragmented and not entirely social. This trend
has led to diminished traffic, engagement rates and sellable ad inventory. Hooked's Yoo-Mee gaming application
helps to reverse this trend by providing publishers access to the benefits associated with social communities. By
partnering with Yoo-Mee, publishers are connected to a vast community of players. Publishers visitors, who mostly
do not engage with others on the site, can now engage with each other on the site and, more importantly, can
invite, compete, challenge and broadcast to and with the rest of the internet community so that people who may
not visit the publishers site, now have a reason to come and join in the fun. Through Yoo-Mee, Publisher's receive
incremental revenue streams from both advertising, cash tournaments, and virtual currency, but also growth in
traffic and user engagement.
Skill gaming - where users play for real money - has been tried in the past with limited success. What
makes you think Hooked Media's version will work? And, on a percentage basis, how much do you see the
skill gaming component contributing for your revenue model?
All signs point to skill gaming growing and not decreasing. A rapidly increasing number of people are playing
games with others and the "gamer" demographic is expanding to include everyone. Hooked Media is positioned to
take advantage of these trends by taking existing high quality games people already play and love and adding a
social experience wherein users play for virtual money or real money. Instead of playing alone, they can play those
same games with others and win money thru skill competitions. In the past a partial limitation has also been
accessibility and scale to enable players to win real money. Through Hooked Media, not only is the current
experience vastly enhanced but players can now play those games wherever they want to play, whether on a
mobile device, website or social network.
There's potential to collect a tremendous amount of data from the audience which visits these games. Can
you see data being collected which may allow advertisers to buy advertising against audience segments
across the web?
Over the last 3 years we've seen a dramatic shift in online targeting thanks to audience data tracking. Hooked
plans to analyze a tremendous amount of data to not only benefit the player experience, but to support and provide
benefit to advertisers. We're going to use player behavioral attributes to help validate marketing initiatives and
develop a deep understanding of the audience as it applies to their gaming profiles.
What will prevent others from hopping into your space such as a Zynga? Is $4.5 million in funding
enough?
Lets start with Zynga and their competitors. The key to hopping into the space is distribution. Hooked Media Group
has an existing and growing network of vertically focused partner websites. Hooked Media works with each partner
to engage their visitors in two ways : provide visitors with game content related to their sites from casual and social
developers and leverage their existing user base by providing a way for them to interact with each other. In fact,
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Zynga is a potential partner - as a content provider, Zynga would partner with Hooked Media Group to be a
distribution mechanism to push their games to more players or to retain their existing players by giving placing their
games in more locations.
By being both a monetization platform, Hooked Media is generating significant revenue already and has
established support from advertisers. As such, our business model is supported from an existing revenue model
and funding is not required. We both have very strong support from both US Venture Partners and Altos Ventures.
By John Ebbert
February 23, 2010 – 4:47 pm
234
Sprout Providing Engagement Through Display Ads For
Brand Marketers Says CEO Williams
Email This Post
February 23, 2010 – 10:00 am
Carnet Williams is CEO and Co-Founder of Sprout, a brand
engagement ad platform.
AdExchanger.com: Let's start with the name - how does
"Sprout" mesh with what you're doing today? And, what
problem is Sprout solving and how does this play out with
your announcement about Disney?
CW: The display advertising business is still incredibly young.
There is so much room for innovation to sprout. We want to make
display ads relevant and engaging. We want to enable brands to
plant relationships with customers and nurture those relationships
with continuous conversations over time.
Today, we announced Sprout Engage Ads. Sprout Engage Ads
allow brands to make stronger connections with their audiences by
providing a fun, interactive experience, wherever their audiences
travel online.
Our first customer to roll out these ads is Disney, who created
Engage Ads for Alice in Wonderland. These ads are designed to
take display advertising to the next level by bringing personally
relevant data right into a standard Flash ad unit. The ads are
'smart' in that they know when you have engaged with them so you
will never see the same content twice. In addition, the ad and the
Facebook application is linked so the ads know if you have
engaged with the app and vice versa. For example, if you add yourself to the Mad Hatter's Army in the ad, when
you come to the Facebook app you will be recognized as being in the army.
Please discuss your datasets around the social graph. How is it collected? And, how much flexibility does
a brand marketer have to customize her/his campaign?
Sprout creates both Engage Apps and Engage Ads. Sprout connects to social graph APIs to read profile data and
write activities back. In the case of Engage Ads running outside of social networks, we use cookie data to
personally identify users and give them content that is applicable to them, whether it's based on location, for
example, or actions a user has taken in another ad.
One great thing about our platform is that brands have complete control over customizing campaigns. Our platform
is incredibly deep. Sky's the limit for what you can do within an ad or social application. And, brand marketers can
modify campaigns based on real-time analytics and these changes go live immediately.
Given your use of Flash, do you see Flash continuing to dominate rich media ads? Is HTML 5 a potential
option for use in development in the future - or even Silverlight? Curious your thoughts on the Web's
"format future," (HTML 5, Flash, Silverlight, etc.) in general.
Right now, given its ubiquity, we are continuing to bet on Flash. I like the idea of an open rich media format but it
looks like we're 18 months away from any real decision-making events. But we will continue to watch the numbers
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closely. The Sprout Engage platform is built on XML so if we need to shift we can easily adjust the platform to
output something other than a .SWF file, such as DHTML or HTML 5.
What's the case for advertising in social media beyond the sheer numbers of eyeballs? And, does Sprout
help with brand safety in delivery of campaigns?
I think that social media is about more than eyeballs. It's about allowing people to have continuous conversations
with the brands they care about. You see the conversations happening on the fan page wall, within applications
and between brand advocates and their friends. Our new Engage Ads allow brands to extend those conversations
beyond the walls of the social networks to any web site.
In terms of brand safety, Sprout offers a campaign console that allows content to be moderated (either before it
goes live or when it's live) and removed, if needed.
What challenges is the creative (as in the human) dealing with today in digital advertising?
One thing we repeatedly hear from our customers is how important time-to-market is when launching apps or ads.
Creatives need to build quickly while focusing on UI, not coding. One of the things that Sprout has said from the
beginning is that we want the creative to maintain control of the rich media. Our platform has a visual interface and
all our Engage Apps and Ads are created by a designer, using WYSIWYG tools. This is important because it puts
the focus on the user experience versus the underlying technology, which can get very complex.
You've likely heard about the media trading platform strategies at VivaKi (nerve center), IPG (Cadreon),
MDC (Varick Media) and Havas (Adnetik) to name a few. How does Sprout work into these strategies?
One of the bottlenecks for real-time ad exchanges is quickly and easily creating content for display advertising. We
think we can solve this problem with the Sprout Engage platform and look forward to working with these DSPs
moving forward. As I mentioned before, the Sprout Engage Platform has a completely visual interface. We have
already done the backend integration with the social networks and 3rd party services, such as Twitter and Google,
for example. So, if a designer wants to add a Twitter feed to an ad, all he/she has to do is drag a Twitter
component onto a canvas and set the user name. It literally takes 2 seconds.
Any thoughts on recent news that Facebook is taking back its display advertising from Microsoft and
using its own, non-standard (as in IAB) units? Does this say anything about the social media advertising
opportunity? And, for brand marketers, in particular?
Consumers expect ads running within social networks to be more targeted and social. When they're not,
performance suffers. Facebook knows that a regular display ad won't perform well on the social network so they
have done the right thing pulling them back.
Today, Sprout Engage Ads running on certain social networks can display social graph data so they're display ads
- - but they're personally relevant to the user. What we're excited about is being able to provide social, applicationlike experiences outside of the networks, wherever people see advertising.
If you were a publisher, perhaps a social media publisher, what would you be doing to insure a future?
Publishers are starting to see advertisers spend dollars traditionally spent with them on social networks. Publishers
need to socialize content on their site. In particular they need to offer their advertisers social features. The
standard IAB ad unit offers a compelling opportunity for them to think of ad units as pieces of content for managing
customers.
Follow Carnet Williams (@carnet), Sprout (@sprout) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
February 23, 2010 – 10:00 am
236
Traffic Tools: Serving, Quality and Attribution
Ad-Juster CEO Lewis Discusses Traction And SaaS
Implications
January 20, 2010 – 2:02 pm
Ad-Juster announced a deal with software solutions provider
Solbright which will allow Solbright clients "to automatically access
third party delivery data from Ad-Juster for billing reconciliation and
discrepancy management." Read the release.
AdExchanger.com caught up with Ad-Juster CEO Mike Lewis to
discuss his company's positioning and the marketplace.
AdExchanger.com: What types of companies are buying your
services right now? Can you identify specific verticals - and/or
horizontals?
ML: Its difficult to identify any specific verticals or horizontals as
thematic in our current customer base. We have premium content
publishers using our system from almost all types, genres and sizes.
Pretty much any company that's serving third party ads as part of
their revenue operations have seen tremendous value in what we offer them. Up until recently our focus has been
on larger digital publishers, companies that often have
their own in-house ad operations groups. However, in the last several months we have expanded our view of the
world and found that there is strong demand for this type of delivery performance measurement and insight among
smaller publishers, ad networks, ad agencies, and even direct advertisers.
We provide value to our customers by paying attention to their work-flows and reducing "stove-pipe" system gaps
between different organizational systems. Our current product has been well adopted by two primary areas of
responsibility within our customer base: Ad Operations and Billing/Finance. We are working both internally and
with potential technical partners to expand our integration of these stove-pipes to include the Sales and Proposal
personnel, and see several great product offerings coming to market in 2010.
AdExchanger.com: It would seem Ad-Juster is a good fit for SaaS companies looking to leverage their
infrastructure and clients with a distinct service in the ad space. Thoughts?
This is absolutely true and a big part of our mission at Ad-Juster. We don't focus on re-creating technologies which
exist and are successful in the market today. Rather we look to create products that make those existing products
and services work better. We do this either by providing existing systems with more information to make better
decisions or by connecting previously unconnected systems to remove the need for human data entry or
transformation which is both time consuming and heavily prone to error.
In keeping with this mission we have just inked an integration partnership with Solbright to automate the ingestion
of 3rd party delivery data into AdSuite. By removing the need for manual upload of 3rd party numbers, customers
using both AdSuite and Ad-Juster will be able to monitor the true billable performance on a daily basis directly
through their AdSuite interface. Customers will also be able to shorten their invoice cycle since end of month
billable numbers (often 3rd party in origin) will no longer need to be manually uploaded before being pushed into
financial back-office systems.
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Ad-Juster remains committed to continuing to broaden our partnerships and help SaaS companies that deal in ad
delivery data increase the accuracy, relevance and value of their products.
AdExchanger.com: Could your "Switzerland" positioning for Ad-Juster also be a good fit for management
of behavioral data and data profiles?
ML: Early on we made a very measured decision not to tie our revenue directly to internal ad operations. This kept
us free from taking sides in the equation between digital publishers and agencies/advertisers. We do not operate
an advertising network and we don't revenue share with any of our clients. We believe that our role in the market is
as a conservator of data. We have gone out of our way to protect the integrity and privacy of our customers' data.
This trust relationship is crucial as we continue to observe an industry wide awakening to the value and potential
dangers of enormous amounts data becoming more personal and more strategic in nature.
We hope that our position will give us the ability to provide valuable insight back to the industry as a whole while
protecting the strategic value each customers individual data sets provide. But any path forward starts and ends
with our commitment to protecting the information we have collected and transformed into actionable insight for our
customer.
By John Ebbert
January 20, 2010 – 2:02 pm
238
Adometry Offering Effectiveness Metrics And Verification
Says CEO Ewel
Email This Post
March 9, 2010 – 9:12 am
Jim Ewel is CEO of Adometry, which provides verification and effectiveness
metrics products for display advertising.
AdExchanger.com: What gave the team the idea for Adometry? And,
what problem is Adometry solving?
JE: Our founders, John Dietz and Rob Perrier, had built a large-scale ad
server for a major publisher. They understood that the kind of information that
they could gather would be very useful to advertisers, both for verification
purposes and to help them understand where best to spend their advertising
dollars. This led them to found Adometry back in 2008.
The problem we’re solving is essentially one of transparency and trust. Much
has been made of the fact that fewer advertising dollars go to online than you
would expect, given the amount of time that people spend online. We
believe, as do many others, that it will take greater levels of transparency and
trust for advertisers to move more advertising dollars into online.
We’ve all seen what transparency, trust and clear effectiveness measures have done for search; we believe that
display advertising can also benefit from similar kinds of tools and measurement.
How do you see optimizing the effectiveness of ads and verification of compliance related to each other?
Is attribution modeling mixed in here?
In order for advertisers to devote more of their marketing budgets to online display advertising, they need three
things: trust that their brands are not going to be damaged by appearing next to inappropriate content, confidence
that they’re getting what they paid for (verification), and metrics that show that the ads were effective in reaching
the marketer’s goals. You can’t have the first two and ignore the third.
In regards to attribution modeling, we’re not trying to compete with attribution products like Clearsaleing or Visual
IQ, which track offline as well as online interactions. On the other hand, we are providing data to help the marketer
understand which of their display ads, in which contexts, at what frequency, are most effective. We’re attributing, if
you will, conversions to particular ads and sites, and showing marketers which ones contribute to their goals.
Are you concerned regarding the many players who have popped up in the verification/validation space
such as AdSafe Media, DoubleVerify, Mpire's AdXpose and others? How do you differentiate?
We see the high number of players entering the market as a good thing; it validates the need and the high level of
interest on the part of marketers, agencies and networks in ad verification.
We differentiate ourselves in several ways: first, we’re a completely independent 3 rd-party and have no conflicts of
interest. Although we resell through some ad networks, we don’t have our own network or sell media. We can
provide consistent ad verification across any publisher, portal or ad network, giving you an unbiased, apples-toapples view across all of them.
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Second, we’re the only vendor that offers both verification and effectiveness metrics, and as I said above, I think
it’s going to take both for advertisers to move more dollars into online display advertising.
Third, our product is by far the most intuitive and easiest to use. Media buyers and traffickers already have their
plates full – they don’t need another complicated interface or a difficult to implement ad verification tool. We make
the process as easy and streamlined as possible, both through our product offering and our customer service.
What about an Adometry media practice? Given the tools you have in-house, this would seem to be a
potential opportunity?
We’ve thought about it, but decided that we need to focus on the product business. We are looking at some
partnerships in this area, but we have no plans to have our own media practice.
How is your nearly 20 years of experience at Go Ahead Software and Microsoft informing the decisions
you're making today at Adometry? Any adjustment getting in the saddle of a new startup?
A lot of the skills that I picked up at Microsoft and GoAhead apply directly: building a team, taking care of
customers, negotiating partnerships, etc. The biggest challenge has been to learn the specifics of the advertising
world. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by a team that has decades of experience in advertising. They’ve taught me a
lot.
Please discuss how you price your product line. And, any early traction you can share - such as client
momentum (vertical strengths, deal size, etc.) - with Veracity?
We have two products. Our entry-level product, Integrity, provides basic ad verification. It is aimed primarily at
networks that want to provide their clients with independent, 3rd party ad verification at a reasonable price.
Veracity, our flagship product, includes everything in Integrity, but it also adds effectiveness metrics and provides
greater transparency to the entire campaign. It is aimed primarily at agencies and marketers. Some performance
networks may also choose Veracity. Both products are priced on a CPM basis, tiered according to monthly
volume. We don’t charge setup fees, user fees or have a monthly minimum.
In terms of traction, we’ve announced a few deals and we’ll announce a few more in the next few weeks. But most
of our customers prefer to remain anonymous, and we haven’t announced them. I can say that with the deals that
we’ve recently concluded and are currently negotiating, we should be profitable in the next quarter, which will allow
us to continue to grow and hire additional staff.
What is the Seattle tech scene like? Strengths, weaknesses?
The Seattle tech scene is fantastic. It’s a great technology town with companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing,
Zillow and lots of smaller startups that you’ve probably never heard of. One of our startups, Picnik. just got
acquired by Google this week. It’s also a center for advertising innovation with companies like aQuantive
(acquired by Microsoft), BlueKai, Audience Science, AdReady and others. There are a ton of events every week
that provide the opportunity to meet other entrepreneurs and potential employees. In fact, I met my partners
through one of the entrepreneurial coffees here in town. If there is one weakness, I’d say that the connection
between Seattle VCs and Seattle entrepreneurs isn’t as strong as it could be. Many of the VCs invest heavily in
non-Seattle companies, and many Seattle entrepreneurs go elsewhere to seek their funding.
A year from now, generally speaking, what milestones would you like to have seen Adometry accomplish?
Right now, we’re focused on customer satisfaction, growth and profitability. Over the next year, this market will
shake out; it can’t support 9-10 profitable players. 2-3 players will rise to the top, and we fully intend to be one of
those players.
Follow Adometry (@Adometry) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 9, 2010 – 9:12 am
240
AdSafe Media On Transparency Into Display Ad Inventory
And iFrame Challenge
Email This Post
February 9, 2010 – 11:09 am
AdSafe Media recently released its first Safety Report that showed - when
looking at display ad media across its platform - "58% of network traffic
was 'invisible'" and "29% of traffic was served to sites featuring UGC"
among many data points. Read the release (PDF). And, you can download
the report here (PDF - signup required.).
AdExchanger.com discussed the report and AdSafe Media with the
company's VP Of Product, David Hahn.
AdExchanger.com: Given your observation of a decrease in nontransparent inventory in Q4, what is your sense of momentum for
transparency into inventory? Is UGC becoming more or less
transparent? Any other momentum stories you can discuss?
DH: We see inventory non-transparency (meaning the lack of real time, source level disclosure of the URL on
which an ad is to be served) as a large and growing concern in the display markets, especially with the recent
increase in “audience buying” via networks and exchanges. Lack of source level transparency is primarily an
unfortunate side effect of inventory “daisy-chaining” (or inter-network reselling) that currently helps facilitate high
inventory liquidity in the display marketplaces. As more advertisers begin using these platforms as a primary
buying channel, it’s essential that we as an industry balance the positives of liquidity with the risks of not knowing
where an ad is being placed. In short, liquidity is good because it equates to more efficient markets and greater
inventory utilization; non-transparency is bad because it results in more brand safety risks to advertisers in the
form of bad ad placements, and thus less dollars online.
The decrease in non-transparent inventory that we saw in Q4 was primarily due to our efforts to mitigate
transparency issues by partnering with our clients. Without our efforts to improve transparency, we would have
certainly seen a much higher percentage of non-transparent inventory. UGC is one of the key categories in which
we have seen increasing non-transparency, most likely due to the large amount of inventory and the re-brokering
required to monetize it.
How does AdSafe technically gather the data that helps you determine whether content is brand-safe or
not? Are iFrames a challenge for this process? If so, how?
DH: We use over 50 data points or attributes of a web page (such as text, images, meta-data, source code etc) to
evaluate each page and produce a brand safety rating. Our data points are collected through a variety of methods
such as active page crawling, integrated third party data sources and other proprietary techniques. These data
points provide information to our rating platform, which is comprised of an active learning cycle of machine learning
algorithms and human analysis, to calculate a page’s AdSafe Content Rating on a 0 – 1000 scale (1000 represents
a high level of brand safety).
In order to gain greater source level transparency through iFrames, we employ a javascript iFrame busting
technology. However, we also recognize that iFrames are a primary ad-serving vehicle for many participants in the
industry. The presence of iFrames doesn’t indicate an issue of brand safety to us, it just forces us to work a little
harder to understand the nature of the content. Using our javascript technology , macro’s and other proprietary
tools we are able to proactively work with partners who have iFrame issues to increase transparency considerably.
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AdExchanger.com: What would you like to see in regards to AdSafe?s Content Rating System as a
standardized industry rating system? For example, the IAB establishes it as a standard? What's the plan
here?
DH: Our goal as a company is to help standardize and simplify the online channel for all participants. Every other
media channel has uniform metrics and standards to help consumers, publishers and advertisers understand the
content and apply it to their respective preferences. The online channel should be no different. Over the last 10
years we have seen a dramatic dispersion between the correlation of audience attention and advertising spend.
The online channel is getting around 35% of the audience but only 5% of the brand dollars. A robust rating
standard like AdSafe can help inspire confidence in the value, legitimacy and safety of the online advertising
ecosystem, meaning all participants can benefit. We will become that standard for online content.
We are working closely with the IAB to ensure that our products align with their initiatives to establish content
rating guidelines and standards related to online content across the ecosystem. AdSafe is a simple and effective
way for the IAB members to comply with the IAB certification guidelines.
AdExchanger.com: The Index is currently for display advertising-only it would appear. Any plans for video,
or even mobile display?
DH: Currently, our rating index rates content on all commercial internet pages (pages on which ads are served).
We will begin introducing ratings for video during the second half of 2010 in order to support in-video advertising
online and we are closely monitoring mobile and as the distribution of advertising shifts to mobile we will look at
ways to support this platform because clearly it is a logical extension of our platform.
By John Ebbert
February 9, 2010 – 11:09 am
242
New Report Says Social Networks Have Less Click Fraud
April 8, 2010 – 2:00 pm
ClickForensics released a new quarterly report which looked at
fraudulent activity related to user clicks and digital advertising.
Read the release. And, download the report (PDF).
ClickForensics CEO Paul Pellman discussed the report, its findings
and methodology.
AdExchanger.com: Why do you think social networks have a
lower average click fraud rate than other CPC traffic sources?
PP: There is inherently less motivation for click fraud on a social
network. The typical incentive for click fraud is to generate fees for
a publisher (Simple example: I write a blog, put AdSense ads
alongside, and click on the ads all day so I make money). On a
social network the only beneficiary of a paid click is the network
itself, so there's no motivation for others to perpetrate click fraud. Also, social networks are closed networks that
require stricter audience validation via user logins, so fraud would be more difficult to effect.
Can you give a use case or two on what publisher collusion fraud looks like?
Publisher collusion fraud occurs when site operators agree to help each other out by clicking on ads not on their
own site, but on their friend/partner sites, generating fees for the friend/partner. That's where the name comes
from, anyway. More commonly the collusion occurs when a single operator registers dozens or hundreds of
domains and then clicks on the ads across all his own domains via some form of automated clicking software or
botnet. The clicks look "random" because they're spread across many domains and originate from many different
computers. In the picture below we provide a simple overview. Triangles represent visitors and circles are sites
visited. Circles surrounded by triangles represent normal activity, many unrelated visitors to a single web site. But
triangles surrounded by circles are problematic, a single visitor to dozens of interrelated sites. Combining this type
of cluster analysis with volume and frequency data, we can identify suspicious activity.
Please discuss the click fraud detection methodology that was used to create this report. Could the
increase seen this year over last year be attributed to increasingly sophisticated detection rather than
more fraud?
Click Forensics examines PPC traffic from over 300 ad networks, top search engines, advertisers and publishers.
We utilize advanced predictive modeling and heuristics to analyze dozens of attributes of every click to detect
fraud and invalid traffic. We've been finding sophisticated types of fraud (collusion, botnets like The Bahama
Botnet, etc.) for some time. One of the reasons for the increase we saw in Q1 was due to the fact that fraudsters
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are using these kinds of sophisticated attacks more frequently because they work. Collusion fraud is a great
example. It's a special form of fraud that requires advanced cluster analysis and pattern recognition to find. Activity
looks very random and patterns are difficult to detect and identify. But our collusion detection algorithms do just
that.
By John Ebbert
April 8, 2010 – 2:00 pm
244
Anchor Intelligence CEO Miller On New Search Product
And Audience Targeting
April 20, 2010 – 9:44 am
Last week, Anchor Intelligence announced its new "Clearmark For
Keywords" product for search marketers, "a predictive, keyword bid
optimization system." Read the release.
Ken Miller CEO of Anchor Intelligence discussed the new product
and its implications.
How does keyword valuation relate to a marketer's propensity to target audience?
KM: Keyword valuation is directly related to a marketer’s ability to reach the target audience for each unique
keyword. If you think about it, a keyword term has a very specific audience in mind; and search advertising is
designed to match audiences with the appropriate keywords. However, we all know that the match making
process is imperfect.
That’s where ClearMark for Keywords comes in. If the keyword “iPad apps” attracts mostly ad clicks from
audiences that have absolutely no relevance to the keyword, then ClearMark would reduce the revenue prediction
for this keyword and therefore reduce the bid.
What problem is ClearMark solving for marketers?
ClearMark for Keywords is designed to solve two problems facing search marketers today. The first is the
challenge of effectively managing bids for high volume head keywords. These keywords are super-competitive and
have a tremendous impact on revenue. However, very few marketers have the ability to make dynamic, intraday
bid decisions to adjust for changes in the expected performance of each keyword. Using audience insights from
each inbound ad click, ClearMark enables advertisers to predict revenue for each keyword. As a result, it starves
keywords that are not hitting their target audience by reducing their bids, and feeds keywords that are attracting
high value audiences by increasing their bids.
The second major problem that ClearMark solves is the challenge of making informed bids on belly and tail
keywords that typically have very scarce or unreliable performance data per keyword. How do you set a bid for a
keyword that’s received 75 clicks but no conversions yet? Today, marketers typically take a best guess at an
opening bid, then wait a long time for reliable performance data before making bid changes. That’s a big
opportunity cost especially when you have hundreds of thousands of belly and tail terms. ClearMark predicts the
revenue per keyword by matching each inbound ad click against thousands of audience profiles we’ve developed
from our traffic quality data. As a result, we’re able to get the marketer as close as possible to setting the perfect
bid for each keyword.
Do you consider ClearMark to be a tool for search or display marketers? Why?
ClearMark for Keywords is primarily designed for search marketers. However, the audience profile data and
matching capabilities that are at the core of this technology will also be applied to the display space. More to come
on that down the road.
From click fraud services to revenue estimates - have you thought about starting your own media
business? Given Anchor Intelligence technology, it would seem to make sense.
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The online ad industry benefits far greater from Anchor as a third-party solutions provider than that of Anchor as a
media business. As a third party, we can continue to build up our data footprint and predictive analytics across the
ad chain while enabling advertisers, agencies, ad networks and search engines to make smarter decisions about
their business. At its core, ClearMark empowers our customers to leverage the “network effect” of the Anchor
Intelligence data. Our ClearMark for Traffic customers learn about threats that occur anywhere within our network
and can therefore proactively protect their advertisers. Our ClearMark for Keywords customers learn how well
their keywords will perform based on matches against our audience profiles and can then place optimal bids. The
entire media industry wins with Anchor as a third party provider powering each piece of the chain.
ClearMark would seem valuable to publishers, too. Thoughts?
Absolutely. Our system is designed to improve the alignment between an advertiser’s keyword and the audience it
reaches. By setting optimal bids based on the predicted value per keyword, advertisers see better performance
from their ad spend. Users also have better experiences as ad relevancy improves. Finally, publishers benefit as
well since improved CTRs will lead to higher revenues for publishers. That said, we also have future plans targeted
specifically at the unique needs of publishers.
By John Ebbert
April 20, 2010 – 9:44 am
246
Click Forensics CEO Pellman Discusses Impression
Inflation, Competitive Set And New Platform
February 26, 2010 – 11:38 am
Click Forensics announced the "beta version of its display ad
verification platform which it says "Protects Against Impression Inflation
and Fraud." Read the release.
AdExchanger.com spoke to Click Forensics CEO Paul Pellman about
the news.
AdExchanger.com: Please define what you mean by "impression inflation." How pervasive is this issue
and how do fraudsters pull it off typically?
PP: Impression inflation is not necessarily fraudulent activity, although that can certainly be part of the problem.
We define impression inflation as anything that happens in the ad-serving chain that would mislead the advertiser
into believing its campaign delivered more impressions to the target audience than it actually did. A simple
example would be a botnet impression that's counted as a human. Another example might be an ad delivered
below the fold that's never seen by an actual human being, but the impression is counted and billed. Impressions
delivered in the wrong geo or daypart also shouldn't count. Then there are the malicious schemes, such as ad
stuffing (displaying multiple ads in the same ad unit for a very brief period), and invisible pages (malware opening
pop-unders or 0x0 browsers to pull ads). These methods can inappropriately pad impression counts and invoices,
reducing overall advertiser campaign effectiveness. The best ad networks and publishers want to assure
advertisers that their campaigns are free from these inflated impression counts and their budgets aren't being
wasted.
Do you offer ad serving capabilities, too? Potentially, it would seem Click Forensics could start a media
business. Thoughts?
No, we have no plans to offer ad serving capabilities or to start another ad network. We prefer to provide
technology and data to our ad network and publisher customers and let them use it to differentiate their offerings.
Looking at the competitive set, it would appear that others such as AdSafe Media, Mpire's AdXpose and
DoubleVerify offer a similar toolkit. How do you differentiate?
We view our offerings as complementary to brand safety companies like DoubleVerify and AdSafe because they're
helping to solve an important part of the ad verification problem -- making sure the page on which an impression is
served is appropriate for the brand. While we take some of these aspects into consideration, we're also auditing
and measuring each individual impression or ad visitor, much like we do for search advertisers. This helps
advertisers to see that the impressions they paid for were in fact delivered and viewed by the intended target
audience. Examples of the attributes we measure in addition to publisher URL include the visitor data (is it human?
is it a known fraudster? is it in the target audience?). Mpire's AdExpose is more similar to what we're doing.
However, our offering is different in that it takes advantage our industry-leading click quality engine, massive
community data set, and more than four years of experience in search traffic quality management.
By John Ebbert
February 26, 2010 – 11:38 am
247
Convertro Tackling Cookie-Free Attribution For Digital
Marketers Says CEO Zwelling
Email This Post
February 18, 2010 – 1:03 pm
Jeff Zwelling is CEO and Co-Founder of Convertro, a marketing metrics attribution company.
AdExchanger.com: What problem is Convertro trying to
solve?
JZ: Marketers today are in large part "flying blind" when it comes to
properly allocating their marketing dollars among their various
marketing channels. I say this because most advertisers are relying
upon outdated tracking technology that is cookie-based, relies
upon sampled data, and attributes credit only to the last click
preceding purchase. The last click fallacy results in overspending
on navigational ad terms while under-spending or eliminating
marketing spend on the so-called "top of the funnel" terms that
actually introduce customers to the website. We have solved this
problem for marketers by overcoming these hurdles and giving
them unprecedented transparency into their marketing channels.
In your company's description, you note that Convertro is selffunded. Does this mean you've been profitable from nearly the
beginning? Are their any special challenges to being selffunded?
Convertro’s technology was built over several years prior to
establishing Convertro as a standalone concern with live clients.
We are supported by client-based revenue from our existing
clients, and we’ve had investment from the founders and others.
So no, funding has not been a challenge for us.
What's your view on the effectiveness of display advertising? Is it being proven with your methodology?
Everyone at Convertro comes from a pretty nuts-and-bolts direct background. Traditionally, we’ve been strong
believers in search and affiliate but skeptics when it comes to the value of display. The exception of course is
behavioral marketing, whose effectiveness we have personally experienced across many campaigns. As a result,
Convertro is developing features to support behavioral campaigns. One is a pixel container that enables Convertro
to selectively fire pixels to third party retargeters against specific calculated criteria. This enables our clients to
market specifically to visitors that meet specific criteria – a classic distinction would be a repeat customer versus a
new one.
Another feature is Convertro’s ability to determine an expected revenue calculation from a particular visitor in real
time based upon a specific sequence of marketing events experienced by that user. For instance, a visitor whose
first visit is from a comparison shopping engine will have much lower expected revenue than a visitor whose first
visit came from a non-branded keyword search followed some time later by a click on a comparison shopping
engine. Convertro is able to set a maximum spend value per visitor that a buying platform such as Invitemedia can
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then optimize against. In the above example, we would recommend spending a lot more on marketing to that
second customer than to the first. This per-visitor calculation is only possible because of our unique ability to track
users reliably from their first visit combined with a very fast database backend that enables value to be immediately
calculated and fired off.
What's client momentum like today? And how does your pricing model work?
Convertro has been very fortunate that there are many forward-thinking companies that have become Convertro
customers. Interest in the space is extremely high, and adoption to date has been tremendous. Convertro provides
tracking on more than 30 major websites today and growing. The verticals within which we have had the most
traction are e-commerce and subscription-based businesses. Our customers include Seven for All Mankind,
Gamefly and Luxurylink. We charge based on the number of events tracked.
How does Convertro differentiate from others in the attribution space such as ClearSaleing, Atlas or inhouse solutions at agencies, for example?
Convertro differs from others in the attribution space in three key areas:
First, the Convertro solution does not rely upon cookies, so we are able to account for all customer activity even
when a cookie is deleted. For a marketer, cookie deletion presents a significant problem: when a cookie is deleted,
all user activity prior to deletion is lost, resulting in conversions tied to partial click trails and inaccurate attribution.
Being able to bridge this cookie chasm is of particular importance to companies that have long purchase
consideration periods and correspondingly high average order values (AOV's). Comscore recently reported that
31% of users have their cookie deleted every thirty days. Our internal data shows that before implementing
Convertro, one out of every seven, or 14%, of our customer's marketing events were "un-attributable" due to
cookie deletion.
Second, unlike first party analytics providers such as Omniture and Google (analytics), Convertro does not rely
upon sampled data . The reason we are able to track every click is because we have built our solution on top of
next-generation databases, which gives us the horsepower to track at such a granular level.
Third, we don’t think that determining allocation formulas is as important as making sure we are giving credit to
every marketing event that led to a conversion. So we’ve focused on data quality rather than data analysis. Inside
Convertro’s dashboard, you can select the "lens" that you want to use to view the data, as well as the allocations to
feed into keyword bid management software or display buying platforms. We make it easy to understand how
every event contributes on a first/multi/last-click basis and enable credit allocation according to the client’s
business needs. For example, in a clicktrail that includes both paid and non-paid marketing events, we can
calculate a revenue distribution across only the paid sources for the purposes of buying more media, while
calculating a distribution across all marketing events, including paid and non-paid, to determine the contribution of
channels like SEO. Fundamentally, we believe that capturing all the marketing events that led to a conversion
should be our top priority: for an analysis to be reliable it must be based on the best data possible. The regression
analyses that some professional service providers such as ClearSealeing market as "sophisticated math" pale in
comparison to the session reassembly algorithms that Convertro’s engine is built on.
Convertro is therefore able to produce drastically improved visibility into which sources contributed to conversion.
Everyone agrees last-click attribution is a broken way of measuring campaign effectiveness. The problem
seems to be that this is the way all of the contracts are already set up (ex. affiliate, cash-back, loyalty
programs, etc.) Even if you can prove that other sources in the chain provided value, how can a retailer
(for example) redistribute the payments?
In the case of affiliates, you can bonus those who are actually bringing customers to the top of the funnel to
compensate for the fact that they are having their cookies overwritten by more cannibalistic affiliates at the end of
the consideration funnel. With Convertro, we can detect when an affiliate is violating program terms, for example
through cookie stuffing or by buying branded terms, and we send notification emails with PIDs and CIDs to our
clients to either reverse the transaction or remove that affiliate from the program.
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With paid search, we find that there are plenty of converting keywords that meet a client’s ROI objectives that are
not getting purchased because they aren’t usually the last click. For many of our clients with strong brands,
identifying keywords other than their own brand requires a technical ability to look all the way back to the generic
keywords that often brought the customer to the site initially; these clicks are seldom within days of the conversion
or even from the same IP address or cookie.
For our subscription service clients, the challenges of using last click are even more complex. The conversion is
really three events – completion of a lead form, marketing the user to get them to become a free trial and then
further marketing them to become a paid customer. Convertro is able to allocate credit back to all of the marketing
sources as that customer becomes progressively more valuable. While our subscription clients will continue to pay
bounties to lead gen for a form complete, they all spend significantly on other types of marketing to get that
customer through each of those stages. Convertro understands this and divvies up credit in ways that enable our
clients to properly allocate credit where credit is due.
Conversion attribution, especially cross-channel, is a huge challenge. Isn't this best left to the big boys Google, MSFT?
Our team is Google-quality and quite better than those at Microsoft/Atlas. At Google and Amazon, small teams that
can share a single pizza develop most products--we build like that. Our approach to distribution is quite simple: we
build a great product that actually works and let our clients refer us more business. We’re not into smoke and
mirrors or super expensive professional services; we just make stuff that works.
What misconceptions do marketers have today regarding attribution and ROI analysis?
As you mentioned, savvy marketers know that the last click model is not the best way to measure the effectiveness
of a campaign, and if they are measuring the ROI of a campaign based upon this flawed model, they won't be
allocating their marketing investment in the most profitable manner. We believe that the best way to measure the
effectiveness of an advertiser's marketing efforts is by determining the proportional revenue per visit, or pRev, for
each traffic source; look at the revenue that PPC, CSE's, and Social contribute drive for example. Determining an
accurate pRev for each of these sources is only possible if you are using a conversion tracking solution, such as
Convertro's, that can overcome the cookie-deletion and data sampling problems.
Where does the creative and messaging fit in with your attribution analysis?
It's an integral part of Convertro's attribution platform. A marketer will only be able to truly understand the
effectiveness of their creative and messaging by being able to accurately attribute and measure the success of
those campaigns to which the creative and messaging are attached. In other words, you won't truly know the
effectiveness of the creative for your PPC efforts, via A/B testing for example, unless you can track each iteration
of your ad on a multi-attribution basis. Convertro's conversion attribution provides incredibly valuable insights into
all marketing channels, including these.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
February 18, 2010 – 1:03 pm
250
DoubleVerify’s Netzer Verifies Capital Raise And Company
Plans
March 8, 2010 – 8:23 am
DoubleVerify, an online advertising verification company,
announced today that it has raised $10 million in Series B financing
from Institutional Venture Partners. Read the release.
Oren Netzer, CEO of DoubleVerify, discussed the raise and the
company's plans.
AdExchanger.com: What were the key characteristics you were searching for in a funding partner?
ON: We wanted an investor that really understands the space well and shares our passion for it, as well as having
deep pockets and was comfortable making significant bets. We found all that in IVP. In the past year, we’ve
created the verification category and took a clear leadership position of the category. Both us and our investors
believe that this category will be dominated by one significant player, much like Nielsen in Television.
Where are the opportunities for growth for DoubleVerify? And, how have these opportunities changed in
the past year?
Verification clearly became an essential part of our clients’ media buys in the past year. We believe that verification
will become ubiquitous in the next couple of years and an essential part of every campaign. And as the online
advertising landscape continues to grow in complexity so will the requirements for verification. For example, with
the planned government or industry regulation around behavioral targeting, regulatory compliance will add an
additional layer of complexity to online advertising. Verification for regulatory compliance will then become of
significant importance. As the leader in the space, these will all be great opportunities for us.
Any thoughts about tackling attribution modeling? It would seem to be a natural extension to validation
and verification by helping advertisers discover ROI across campaigns.
Our clients see us as the “auditors” of the online advertising space. As such, we hold ourselves to the highest
standards of integrity and are extremely cautious in how we use data that we may have access to and are always
fully transparent about its use. We’d stay away from any use of data or any opportunity to expand our business
that does not coincide with our core values and our clients expectations.
By John Ebbert
March 8, 2010 – 8:23 am
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Mpire Announces Ad Blocking For AdXpose; CEO Kirby
Winfield Discusses Feature And Clients
February 3, 2010 – 1:11 pm
Mpire announced new ad blocking capabilities for its AdXpose product where,
"AdXpose analyzes the content on publisher sites in real-time, and crossreferences it with the prescribed rules set by the advertiser." If the content is
acceptable, the ad is served. If not, it's not. Read the release.
AdExchanger.com spoke to Mpire CEO Kirby Winfield about the new feature
overall business.
and
AdExchanger.com: Can you explain the issue around Iframes? And, how
does AdXpose tackle it for your new "proactive ad blocking" feature?
KW: The issue around Iframes for our agency and platform clients is that
Iframes limit visibility into where ads are appearing, and how they are
performing. Specifically, up to 40% of
impressions on a typical non-premium display buy can "dead end" at an ad network or server URL due to
multiple Iframes within the delivery path. So, our clients are initially unable to see whether their ads were
delivered within IO-specified parameters, or whether fraudulent activities like ad stuffing (nested Iframes) or
other impression fraud occurred.
With AdXpose's patent-pending technology, we're typically able to get
through several layers of Iframes to see where the ad is actually appearing and what kind of performance the ad
is seeing, based on viewable impressions, user and brand engagement, geographic and demographic
targeting, and more; reducing the obfuscation to single
digit percentages in many cases. And where obfuscation
remains, we encourage our clients to examine the channel and provider which is
obfuscated and make a
judgment call on how far they trust that channel.
With our new ad blocking capabilities, the user can set any
number of
alerting thresholds around the above mentioned attributes, and once triggered, either receive
notification or stop the ads from appearing
down those channels or sites. One attribute of ad blocking that solves
the Iframe issue is the simple ability to require that any obfuscated domain (unless it is on a white list provided
by the client) be prevented
from serving an ad.
AdExchanger.com: How are your clients segmenting? Is AdXpose sold to agencies more than, say, ad
networks? Where do you expect momentum to go for your client base?
KW: Right now our AdXpose client base skews towards agencies. Clearly today, without any universal shift at the
platform level to visibility and transparency into most buys, the demand is being driven by the buy-side and
brands. Also, because we offer additional data points like heatmapping and user engagement at the URL level -which allows for
pinpoint creative optimization, for example -- agencies have more uses for us than the simpler
"point solution" verification providers. At the same time, you'll see more announcements from us on the platform
side as well. Specifically due to our XML API, real time data
collection methodology, and breadth of data points
captured, we have an unprecedented ability to offer terabytes of raw verification and
optimization data to those
DSP and exchange partners who consume data as
part of their algorithmic approach to acquiring audience.
In a real-time bidded environment, can AdXpose work? Even on dynamic content?
KW: The short answer is, yes. Since AdXpose - unlike other verification
providers - sits on the actual page where
an ad is served at the exact
time at which it is served, we are uniquely positioned to help power RTB decisions.
That stated, the feedback loop needs to be very tight in order to leverage that dynamic page data while it is still
valid, and we are working with pilot partners on defining how that process is most
effective.
By John Ebbert
February 3, 2010 – 1:11 pm
252
Mpire Announces AdXpose API; CRO Winfield Discusses
Pricing and Services Layer
February 24, 2010 – 12:05 am
Mpire announced a new API which provides "advanced reporting
capabilities" from AdXpose, Mpire's campaign verification and
optimization technology, on such data points as domain
verification, location on the page, geographic location of the user,
user demographic and page or site context. Read the release.
Mpire President and CRO Kirby Winfield shared his thoughts with
AdExchanger.com about the evolution of the AdXpose product and the API.
AdExchanger.com: What's the pricing like for the API? And, are you moving away from offering a services
layer for the AdXpose product at Mpire?
KW: Pricing will be an incremental CPM fee on top of the base service fee. We will basically offer API access at or
near "cost" - it is meant to be a value-add to our ad server, network, and DSP clients. We are in no way moving
away from the services layer, however. On the contrary, we are currently hiring technical account managers to
help service our clients and prospects: because we provide so much more than just simple verification reports, it's
crucial that we make it easy for our clients to understand the implications of the data and make human decisions in
addition to any algorithmic decisions made leveraging the API.
What about API integration? Is this difficult for groups that may be less technically skilled such as some
agencies, for example?
We are finding that most agencies now have the ability and desire to integrate data from multiple sources into their
dashboards, reports, and decisioning engines. As Google VP of Product Management Susan Wojcicki said today
at the IAB Leadership Meeting, "if you're using spreadsheets to manage campaigns, you're leaving dollars on the
table." The holding company agency DSP's are especially well positioned to integrate the API, and we work with
the majority of these entities today.
How is Mpire's AdXpose media business progressing? And how does this API release affect it or say
about the company's media business?
The media business is largely a sandbox for continued development of our AdXpose Analytics technology. Sitting
on a consistent volume of directly purchased impressions (we do not buy from or compete in any way with ad
networks - in fact, some buy from us) allows us to test new features in real time without using clients as guinea
pigs. That stated, it's the technology and our technology clients that drive the enterprise value for our business,
and that's the side of the business that gets the lion's share of our investment. To that end, the API release is
simply further confirmation of our commitment to creating the leading brand safety and display ad analytics
company online.
By John Ebbert
February 24, 2010 – 12:05 am
253
TagMan GM And Founder Baron Discusses Funding And
Business Momentum
February 15, 2010 – 12:03 pm
AdExchanger.com discussed TagMan's new funding announcement (See
release.) and recent momentum with Jonathan Baron, co-founder and
general manager of Tagman.
AdExchanger.com: What attributes did you look for in a funding
partner? How have you found the funding climate?
JB: We sought partners that had an understanding of the online ad
marketplace such that they could see the strategic and practical importance
of TagMan. This meant, ordinarily, previous experience in founding and/or
directing ventures that had shaken the online marketplace. We’re delighted
that we were able to find the likes of John Taysom and Andy Phillipps,
people who have done just that and that they were immediately convinced
enough of TagMan’s ability to deliver on its promise to become involved.
There’s no question there are investment funds available for those
businesses that can demonstrate a revenue model that’s already
succeeding and something different enough to suggest additional, strategic
value. We found plenty of willing potential partners and were able to be discerning about the size and type of
money we took.
How do revenues break out these days between the U.S. and Europe?
We are as much a US business as a European one – 50% of our revenues are derived from the States and that’s
because TagMan solves the same basic issues that face all sophisticated online marketers regardless of their
location – that is that advertiser sites are swamped with tracking tags and the problems their proliferation poses
can only be effectively solved in one way – through a container tag that is independent of all providers.
What other trends are you seeing with the TagMan product line?
Some clients start to use us purely for tag management, which for many is itself a pain so large that it’s worth
investing in a solution, while others start their business case for investment in TagMan through simple
deduplication – that is paying commission only to the partner that really did deliver the last click. But, all clients
soon appreciate the value of being able to gain a single view of their customers and to make their marketing truly
data-driven outside those more obvious and direct benefits to the bottom line.
Give me one milestone you would like TagMan to have accomplished a year from now.
We would like to have met the top 20 e-commerce site owners in the US and have helped them to understand the
precise nature of the problems that tracking tags pose to their business. We’re naturally hoping that, after that,
they’ll be persuaded that TagMan really is the solution to all those problems.
By John Ebbert
February 15, 2010 – 12:03 pm
254
TrackSimple Looking To Layer Predictive Analysis On
Actionable, Big Data Says CEO Ingalls
March 23, 2010 – 12:51 pm
Jon Ingalls is Co-Founder and CEO of TrackSimple, online advertising
technology company.
Please discuss your background. Moving big data has always come
with the territory it would appear.
I've been lucky to work in markets where data is very important. I was at
Amazon.com during an incredible growth cycle and was responsible for
building out Amazon’s large-scale data aggregation network. That
infrastructure processes several hundred terabytes of performance and
operational data every day. Seeing such a powerful application make it
easy to aggregate, easy to mine, and easy to share all this data made me
think other companies could benefit from this kind of technology.
What problem is TrackSimple solving?
TrackSimple automates the three critical pieces of managing data in
distributed environments:
1. Data collection;
2. Highlighting critical insights from data; and
3. Sharing data safely and securely with partners.
Interactive advertising resides within an almost completely SaaS or service
infrastructure, meaning that data which is critical for planning, in-market
optimization, and analysis is invariably siloed, sometimes intentionally sometimes not. This is called a distributed data environment - we think of this as a Data 1.0 environment – where
there is a lot of data within an enterprise, but no simple way to discern what is actionable data, let alone what to do
with toward making predictions.
Because of the powerful economics of the web and online storage, data is almost casually produced as a massive
by-product of companies’ collective activities. This spans all channels and tactics, display, email, search, coupon,
etc. In other words, while everyone knows that there is a ton of data in our business, they don’t know what to do
with it, and the fact is that there’s probably a whole lot more data that they’re not even aware of, but could do a lot
with if they knew how.
Who do you consider to be in your competitive set?
What we did at Amazon.com has not been duplicated anywhere, and I think it’s safe to say that people regard that
as the best system of its kind. So we have not encountered any true competitors yet. Assuredly, some will rise.
But 1. Our system is indifferent to where the data comes from and the format.
2. Our predictive analytics stack automatically surfaces correlations in this context. This means more data
can become actionable automatically through our technology.
3. We have invested a lot of time and money into making this a very low IT burden on the industry. We show
them what they can be doing with their own data because it’s simple to get started and add additional data
sources easily.
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What are the factors involved that will enable the trading of online media? Can you see it happening
someday?
The industry is certainly taking steps in that direction, it’s fun to watch. We see new companies being created just
to educate and enable Agencies to participate on the buying exchanges and intent exchanges.
I’m a huge fan of the direction and the buying and selling within a data economy, but the value of any purchase
needs to be measured and that is hard to do in a distributed data environment where there is no data standard and
there won’t be for the foreseeable future.
Nick Brien touched this point at 4A’s. The industry is drowning in data and that’s exactly why we created
TrackSimple - to make it simple to collect, correlate and share data for greater returns. We have a lot of
experience at surfacing what drives and degrades results. The Agencies and Publishers we work with are
leveraging TrackSimple for precisely this purpose.
What is predictive analytics cluster analysis? Why should marketer care about it?
Interactive media marketers have been talking about data for years. But, how often do you hear anyone talking
about predictive analytics? While some companies are claiming to provide predictive analysis, there is nobody
enabling the kind of predictive analytics and dynamic segmentation that we provide.
Simply stated, by leveraging the cloud and performing dynamic segmentation for each campaign, our technology
enables marketers to compare exchanges, sites, data-suppliers, psychographic, demographic, seasonal, site and
property attributes across an infinite array of metrics or conversion outcomes – whatever the marketer defines.
So, our technology enables marketers to make predictions in an ongoing manner, every day – while also showing
them in stark, graphical terms, why these predictions are the right ones.
TrackSimple creates an easy to use destination where marketers can manage and leverage their advertising data,
which has clearly outgrown the standard spreadsheet pivot table.
Do you provide the insights in layman's terms or does the marketer need to do sift through the data feeds
to make it actionable?
Marketers need not ever sift through our interface. We make it very simple.
We have tailored our resulting predictions into very simple Drop or Increase recommendations and we show you
the probable outcome in advance.
Amazon was a great teacher in this respect. One of the reasons ecommerce is so successful is because Jeff
Bezos is relentlessly focused on the consumer and making it convenient for them to buy whatever they can
discover – for example “1-Click”.
Can you talk a little bit about the federated data model? Is the customer ready?
Marketers (and some publishers) are creating their own federated data models every day. Every-time a Media
Planner, Analyst, Director or Inventory Analyst pulls data and reports from multiple vendors to create a view of the
world they are creating a federated data model. Ad-Networks are federated data models in action. Because the
data is so valuable, it’s rare you see joint federated data models between these entities.
Publishers have the most to gain from federating data and IAC Advertising is a great example of aggregating data
and inventory to create better selling opportunities at scale.
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Trouble is, both Marketers and Publishers are trying harness the power of data using Excel as the aggregator,
which is a wonderful tool that has quite literally powered decision making for the last 10 years. But Excel doesn’t
scale very well to the amount of data, doesn’t generate recommendations with predictive outcomes. The industry
needs to be able to collaborate and share data dashboards with information that is valuable to each party without
giving away the farm. For example, few Agencies will share conversion data with publishers unless the
relationship is really strong, but both parties would benefit if they could share it without exposing each other’s
incentive.
How long does it take for a client to become integrated with Track Simple? And, when do they start seeing
the insights?
Most of our clients are up in running in 2-4 weeks and then it runs continuously so it’s not a big up-front to get
started. After that, clients generally want to contribute additional sources that will produce new segments, such as
geo-targeting. We take log-files, API’s, CSV files, streaming data, data via FTP this makes pulling the data in easy
for us and next to zero IT integration. Naturally, our technology works with all the major service providers in
display, search and email.
Follow TrackSimple (@tracksimple) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
March 23, 2010 – 12:51 pm
257
Back Office
Solbright CEO Pace Says Advertising Will Remain Major
Way Publishers Create Revenue; Discusses Company’s
Back Office Solutions
January 27, 2010 – 9:17 am
Tom Pace is CEO of Solbright, a web publisher solutions provider.
AdExchanger.com: Solbright has been around for a while.
Discuss the evolution of your company and how it has tracked
changes in the online ad industry.
Solbright started out as a practical solution for addressing the basic
business processes of publishers and Web sites looking to manage
their online advertising businesses. It began with some
improvements in the trafficking and operations area, including flight
and creative management. Over time, as the process grew
increasingly complex, features and functionality were added to the
Solbright solution to address the sales and billing processes,
followed by inventory forecasting and management. All of these
features were strategically considered and added in order to reflect
the needs of the online ad market as it grew over the years. Now ad
hoc reporting, yield management, multiple ad server management,
third-party system and buy-/sell-side integration are all being
addressed due to the current and anticipated demands of the
market. In addition, we’ve partnered with leading technology
providers – such as Ad-Juster, with whom we announced a
partnership last week – to integrate these technologies into our
solution and further simplify the process of digital ad operations management for premium publishers. When you
are managing processes for the best publishers and Web sites in the business, there is a terrific interplay of ideas
and trends coming from this base of clients, all of which are setting expectations and needs for the market based
on real-world experience.
AdExchanger.com: Do you think publishers are going to have to move away from advertising solutions for
monetization and toward pay walls?
Publishers and Web sites will do what is necessary to grow their businesses. This will not mean a simple pay-vs.advertising model. It will mean optimizing the advertising model through use of better management tools to
increase revenue and the efficiency of their operations. It will mean relying on management tools that allow bestof-breed options to be used when most expedient and in a manner providing maximum control to the
publisher/Web site over its information and operations (including use of third party systems). It will mean
increasing the media formats and targeting options to advertisers. It will also mean finding other ways to maximize
the value of content through distribution, syndication, networking and other segmentation options; the Web offers
limitless opportunities in each area. Subscriptions and other pay schemes may come into play as well, but
advertising will remain a major – if not the major – means of monetizing the content and services being provided.
How is your product line playing out today? What pain points are you trying to solve?
Publishers and Web sites are rightfully concerned about the growing power of a few major players in online
advertising. Do they want to rely on these players – who are competitors, I might add – to handle their most
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important and confidential information and processes? Our product line is designed to keep control and power in
the hands of the publisher/Web site. These companies need more options, not fewer options, to address the
growing cross-media format, flexible targeting, sell-side/buy-side integration, third-party system integration and
tracking/auditing requirements. Certain major players would have the market believe that only they can offer fully
integrated, one-size-fits-all solutions intended to meet these complex needs. But just the opposite is true. Instead,
these players limit options and assume some control over publishers’ information and business. Our focus is to
provide more options to the publisher/Web site and, in doing so, enable them to maintain full control over their
digital advertising businesses.
What's your view on exchanges and demand-side platforms? Do they benefit the publisher?
There can be definite benefits to publishers in having access to such third-party platforms. Demand-side platforms
can provide access to ready buyers. The important thing is that publishers be able to access and use these
platforms intelligently.
Can you see a day where there is a futures exchange for digital advertising? Given Solbright's interest
around inventory forecasting, you may have special insight here.
There may well be a futures exchange for digital advertising across all distribution platforms. But before that can
happen, there needs to be greater connectivity and interaction between the buy- and sell-sides of the market. This
means building connections between buy- and sell-side systems and providing information to both sides so that
intelligent and efficient decisions and executions can be made. When that more efficient mechanism is in place,
then, like the financial markets, all kinds of interesting derivative plays come into the picture.
How is the leveraging of audience data playing into development of your products?
Data plays a critical part for the market as a whole and for us as a key system provider. This information goes
beyond audience data, which is just one part of the picture.
On the agency side, is there a fit for Solbright services that can help better synchronize the moving parts
within their organizations to maximize revenue?
Absolutely, there is a fit. We are in the process of integrating with buy-side systems that will make it easier and
more cost-effective to place digital ads across markets. Agencies are anxious to find more affordable and efficient
ways to manage their digital buys.
What common mistakes do direct sales teams make when forecasting their inventory?
You mean beyond over- or underselling every day? It’s a formidable task to forecast and track avails in the online
market. Not only do you have dynamic changes in inventory based on ever-changing numbers of users and hits,
but there are also dynamic changes in site configuration, content, ad sizes and ad formats to deal with, as well as
promotional and marketing campaigns. In addition, you often have multiple sales people selling in real-time
against that dynamic inventory, which can result in competing bookings and oversold conditions. All of this can be
a real mess. We are focused on providing the most useful solutions possible to address those issues for sales and
inventory planning people.
How much of a problem is the ad network model for publishers? Isn't it helping?
The ad network model works to some degree for remnant inventory, though of late with such low rates for remnant
inventory a number of publishers are turning to in-house ads instead of running the ads on networks, as they see a
greater return from such in-house promotional use. The vertical networks, like Adify, seem to help niche
publishers find a broader network of affiliates to increase the scope and reach of ads that they can undertake. One
of the biggest problems for publishers is working with ad networks in an efficient and integrated manner. Most
situations are standalone and outside publishers’ normal business processes. We are working on integrating third-
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party ad network offerings into our system so that publishers can access them more readily using the Solbright
system tools they use every day for their direct sales.
Follow AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
January 27, 2010 – 9:17 am
260
Venture Capital
M&A This Year, Especially Q3 And Q4 Says
DeSilva+Phillips’ MacDonald
April 1, 2010 – 8:57 am
The research arm of DeSilva & Phillips recently published a paper
called "Ad Exchanges, RTB and the Future of Online Advertising"
about the fast-moving, digital advertising ecoystem. You can
download it here.
Jay C. MacDonald, Partner, DeSilva + Phillips, discussed the research paper and today's M&A environment.
AdExchanger.com: For DeSilva & Phillips, what were the tipping point(s) for deciding to create "Ad
Exchanges, RTB and the Future of Online Advertising"?
JM: I/we have done a lot of deals in the ad network, online marketing services arena (IE-ad based models) and are
very familiar with the trends and challenges facing the online advertisers and advertising. We have witnessed the
impact that technology has played in the revolution impacting all facets of the buying process: targeting, roi
measurement, ad units/placement, etc. and knew that the continued development and deployment of exchanges
with RTB was going to again disrupt the entire buying process. So we wanted to see if our premise was right.
Can you discuss the available window for exits to ad tech companies?
It’s always tough to predict the timing of exits but clearly there will be one within the next 6 months given the nature
of the industry which is always looking for a technology based advantage to gain share over their competitors. And
the 800lb gorilla in the space (Google) means that the field needs to make bets that will either take them into direct
competition with Google or head in another profitable way.
What are the variables to this "window?" If one DSP sells, for example, do the other still have
opportunities?
There are a lot of variables: timing, funding levels, market conditions and more. But, we don’t see mass
consolidation happening until the first few bets are made and the industry absorbs the impact of those and then
decides if they are right or wrong.
Do you anticipate significant M&A this year? What type of companies may go first, if so? And what may
the range in exit prices look like?
I do see quite a bit of M&A this year, especially Q 3 & Q4. And M&A includes additional funding for some players
who want to hold out for scale and for an IPO or a super large exit. There will be a lot of obvious categories like the
Ad Network space where the activity will be brisk but what’s most interesting will be to see who the buyers are
because I submit that the definition of “what is a media company” has is changing quickly (note: Adobe buying
Omniture, Limelight buying EyeWonder).
By John Ebbert
April 1, 2010 – 8:57 am
261
First Round Capital’s Fralic Says Team and Market Size
Are More Important Than Product
March 1, 2010 – 9:29 am
Chris Fralic is Managing Partner of First Round Capital, an earlystage investment company.
AdExchanger.com: It seems like First Round is everywhere ok, maybe not everywhere, but you all are invested in quite a
few companies at an early stage. What's the method to the
madness?
CF: Yes we are busy, and we do think we have a method to our
model. We typically work with companies at the seed stage where
it takes relatively small amounts of capital to get started, and we
provide the bulk of our value and time in the first 18-25 months of a
company's formation. We were one of the most active investors in
2009 according to this Wall Street Journal article and now have 8
partners and investment professionals and we're opening our NYC
office in addition to our San Francisco and Philadelphia offices. We
also focus on providing tools/platforms and "structural value" that
go beyond just the capital we provide and the point person they
have from First Round. But we do keep very busy and like to think
we work as hard as our entrepreneurs.
What are a few key characteristics of a compelling product for
an investment?
I'd say product is important but that the market size/opportunity and
the entrepreneur/team are more important - we like to back great
entrepreneurs going after big market opportunities. But on the product side, I'd say it's really important to
understand your customer and their problem and how your product solves it - too often that's not understood or
articulated clearly enough.
And how about entrepreneurs who are often the CEOs of the young startups - any key traits here? Or is it
all about the product and its opportunity?
I'd say there are a number of key traits - we want people who are smart and passionate about their idea, and it
goes without saying that we look for people with integrity and character who do what they say they're going to do.
We prefer entrepreneurs who have started a company before or worked in a startup environment so they're not
making first time mistakes, however we've made exceptions to that rule and have had a number of good outcomes
with first-time CEO's. Another key trait is also how quickly they can learn and adapt.
You've noted in the past about how companies "pivot" with their business models. Can you explain what
you mean? Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
It's a good thing - when we see a startup business plan we know one thing for sure about it - that it's wrong - it's
just that no-one's sure exactly how it's wrong yet. We think the primary goal of seed stage investing is to help the
entrepreneur validate or disprove their hypothesis, or to sufficiently "de-risk" it in order for them to attract additional
external investment. So the key to a successful "pivot" is understanding how you might need to change your
approach before you run out of money - or before you spend too much time or money.
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Looking forward, what's your view on M&A momentum in the digital media technology space? For
example, is this the year? Or is it more of a 2011 or 2012 phenomenon?
It's hard to look out too far, but things certainly seem to be lining up for a much better 2010 and hopefully beyond.
Do you think opportunities in the mobile advertising space are finally hitting their stride? What's a key
reason or three that mobile will continue to be hot?
The space has certainly heated up with the Admob/Google and Quattro/Apple acquisitions - but I still think it's early
and there's room for more successful companies in the space. Smartphones and mobile devices are a huge part of
the future if computing if not the computer of the future, and they know more about you than your laptop or
desktop. Done right, mobile advertising can be huge, and it's also pretty interesting to think about what Apple might
do with advertising - they've never focused on it before.
If you're an entrepreneur, what are your suggestions on the best way to pitch venture capital firm such as
First Round Capital?
I put together a few thoughts on the subject a couple years ago and I think they're mostly still true. At First Round
we don't provide direct email addresses on our site, but we do list our LinkedIn Profiles
(http://firstround.com/contact.html) and we're also actively blogging, tweeting, etc. so there are a number of ways
to get connected. And we've also started something we call "Office Hours" which is a way that entrepreneurs can
meet us and get to know us in an informal setting. We've already invested in a company we first met at one in NYC
- so I'd recommend entrepreneurs keep an eye out at http://officehours.firstround.com/ for an upcoming Office
Hours event.
Follow Chris Fralic (@ChrisFRC), First Round Capital (@firstround) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on
Twitter.
March 1, 2010 – 9:29 am
263
Demand-Side Platforms, Small Advertiser Solutions And
Social Targeting Interest Highland Capital’s Nichols
March 4, 2010 – 10:16 am
Matt Nichols is a Principal at Highland Capital Partners, a venture capital
firm.
AdExchanger.com: Highland Capital Partners has a rich history of
venture investment in the ad tech space. What sets it apart from
other VC firms in the space?
MN: Highland has been a long-time investor in the ad tech space from the
early days to today. We were investors in FastClick, one of the early
pioneers in the ad network space, which we took public and then sold to
ValueClick. We were also an early investor in Quigo which provided
contextual advertising to top-tier publishers and who we ultimately sold to
AOL. We invested in Navic which provided TV Advertising technology
and was acquired by Microsoft. Most recently, we seeded and invested in
Quattro Wireless which we just sold to Apple.
The consistent theme has been to identify growth markets early and find great teams that can execute against
those markets. In some cases, like Quattro, we invested solely on the team and the market opportunity – the
product had not yet been defined or built.
We also leverage our investments in other parts of the ecosystem to identify opportunity and put ourselves in the
mindset of the ad buyer or the publisher. As investors in owners of inventory like Lycos, AskJeeves, and
Mapquest early in the Internet and Digg, Metacafe, CafeMom, and others today, we know what challenges are
facing publishers. We also have invested in major advertisers like VistaPrint, Cash4Gold, and others that are
some of the largest buyers of various types of ad inventory. These perspectives are helpful as we help our ad
technology companies define their products and strategy.
Are you seeing opportunity today in the ad tech space? Any sweet spots intrigue you, in particular?
There are a few areas where I have particular interest:
A) Enabling ad technology for smaller advertisers. Google Ad Words works for small advertisers because it is
simple to use and effective. The same cannot be said for display and other types of online advertising. I am
looking for companies that are taking the sophisticated marketing tools and “dumbing them down” to make them
easy to use for small advertisers. If you are using the words “exchange” or “demand-side” or other buzzwords, you
aren’t going to win over the very small advertiser. There will be big wins for those that can find, market, and win
over small business customers with simple ad solutions.
B) Social Media Targeting: We are still in the early innings of using social media data to solve marketing
challenges. The power of using social graphs to expand existing advertising kernels has the potential to solve one
of advertisers’ biggest challenges – having a great set of users to target, but not having enough of them to make a
difference. Despite the massive amount of inventory on social networks, I believe the real value will come from
using that valuable data to target users across the web.
C) Demand-Side Platforms: While it may be the flavor-of-the-month and an over-used term, there is a big need to
help agencies and advertisers make sense of the increasing number of inventory sources (exchanges, sell-side
platforms, ad networks, etc.) This need will only increase as Google and others flood the market with real-time
inventory which will require more sophisticated technology to consume and analyze in real time. There are clearly
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too many players in this market today, but once advertisers and agencies get through the testing phase (which is
still ongoing), there will be value in working with one DSP who will help them provide one unified view of their
customers and their prospects.
When you meet an entrepreneur/co regarding possible investment, what characteristics are you looking
for in her or him which go beyond the product?
Team, Team, and Team. If you have a great team going after a large market opportunity, you maximize your
changes for success. These markets are changing so quickly that a great product is only a differentiator for a
matter of months, and great teams will figure out where the market is going and build towards that. Our teams
have been the reason for our success in this space to date, and we don’t expect that to change going forward.
How does your work with First Growth Venture Network differ from HCP?
My work with First Growth is very similar to my work at HCP. Our goal at First Growth is to identify and nurture
great talent, which is very consistent Highland’s approach of building great companies together with our
entrepreneurs.
We’ve backed a number of young entrepreneurs at Highland and we’re always looking to invest in the next wave of
young entrepreneurs. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to fund one that comes out of First Growth, but are open to
seeing great talent from any source.
You're based in Boston. How does the Boston-area compare to other hotbed of advertising and ad tech
activity? Any momentum you can see/share?
Being an east-coast VC is certainly an advantage in the ad tech space as both Boston and New York are centers
for customers and startup talent. Our last 3 exits in the ad tech space were east-cost companies – Quattro and
Navic were in Boston and Quigo was in New York. We’re certainly seeing momentum here.
What's your view on momentum in M&A and acquisitions in 2010 in the ad tech space? Who will be the
players? Or, is this more of 2011 or 2012?
I’ve been on all side of the M&A equation as a tech banker in Silicon Valley in the late 90’s and early 00’s, at
Google for a short stint in M&A, and as a venture capitalist, but its still very hard to predict timing of M&A. If I had
to guess, I’d say we’ll see some small company sales in the next 6 months as the strategic acquirers try to pick up
a few companies before they get enormous customer traction. We’ll see the big acquisitions at the end of 2010
and 2011 as volume on exchanges increases and advertisers leave the testing phase and begin to direct very
large budgets through the next-gen startup companies
Given the hoopla around demand-side platforms, where does the sell-side shakeout here in your opinion?
As I mentioned above, I think there are too many DSPs, but I do believe they provide real value and they will be a
mainstream tool for both agencies and advertisers over the next few years.
Sell-side platforms also provide value, but it has yet to be determined whether they really just morph into
exchanges (many already are). On the sell-side, I’m most interested in those that help the mid to smaller size
publisher because they lack the staff and sophistication to optimize their inventory. They also lack the large direct
salesforces that may feel threatened as exchange inventory improves and becomes a viable channel for nonremnant inventory.
We are very bullish on the ad tech space right now and with a new fund raised last year, are looking aggressively
to fund great teams in this space.
Follow Matt Nichols (@mnichols47), Highland Capital (@HighlandCapital) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger)
on Twitter.
March 4, 2010 – 10:16 am
265
Yield Optimization
PubMatic CEO Goel Discusses Series C Funding, Company
Plans
April 15, 2010 – 1:50 pm
Publisher yield optimization company, PubMatic, announced a $7.5
million Series C investment round led by existing investor Helion
Venture Partners. Read the release.
CEO Rajeev Goel discussed the funding and plans for the
company.
AdExchanger.com: Can you talk a bit more about how your platform will manage both direct and nonguaranteed inventory? Why the move here?
RG: The PubMatic Premier platform isn’t really a move in a new direction, but more of a natural expansion of
offerings that we’ve been working on for a long time - and helping publishers manage their inventory is just a part
of it. We have been helping publishers better manage and monetize their non-guaranteed revenue since 2006, but
now we’re also giving publishers the opportunity to manage and better monetize their guaranteed inventory.
We’ve also built out the most comprehensive suite of publisher focused brand control products on the market. This
includes RTB brand control too, which we’ve had for 15 months.
In fact, we’re hosting a private event next month at the Helen Mills Theater in NYC to showcase those brand
control products. So PubMatic’s Premier platform is not just about managing guaranteed and non-guaranteed
inventory, it’s truly about giving publishers more revenue and more control.
How does the revenue model work for direct inventory management? (a license, % of CPM, etc.) Can
publishers work with PubMatic on direct channel management only?
In terms of revenue it is similar to our core offering, we charge publishers based on the value of media that we
manage. In terms of how publishers use guaranteed channel management, it really depends on the individual
publisher needs.
With "700% growth in revenue," where does PubMatic shake out with profitability today? Is that a 2010
goal or in the future?
No doubt we’re experiencing tremendous momentum on many levels, but we’re not taking our eye off the ball.
We’re about building a strong company that helps premium publishers manage and monetize their ad inventory.
We’re 100% focused on being the best at that, which means continue building out the best team in the business
and continuing to be the leader in innovation for this space.
By John Ebbert
April 15, 2010 – 1:50 pm
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Looking At The Real-Time Bidding Numbers With
PubMatic’s Goel
January 12, 2010 – 7:48 am
AdExchanger.com asked PubMatic's CEO Rajeev Goel about
their recent estimate for total RTB (real-time bidding) spend this
year and last which he offered in a MediaWeek byline this week.
Goel emphasized that this is an estimate.
RG: Our estimate is based on our own methodology. Here is an
overview of how we came up with it:
1. We took an estimate of revenue made from the DSP's in
2009, which we gathered as less than $100MM total based
on a number of things including conversations we've had w/
CEOs, etc.
2. We expressed $100MM as a percentage of the $15B online ad market - which is .70%, or roughly 2/3 of
1%.
3. Then, we added the latest players in the space, and looked at how things are ramping up on our side. We
see aggressive growth in in 2010... So, 3-5% is our best estimate.
To be clear, this is NOT reflective of the percentage of RTB transactions that PubMatic facilitates.
By John Ebbert
January 12, 2010 – 7:48 am
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PubMatic CEO Goel On Ad Price Index And Publishers
January 20, 2010 – 9:28 am
Pubmatic has released its latest Ad Price Index focusing on
"premium publishers." According to the report, CPM pricing has
been moving up. Read the release. And, download the report
(PDF).
AdExchanger.com spoke to PubMatic's CEO Rajeev Goel about
the report.
AdExchanger.com: In your estimation, what's the biggest "a
ha!" in the report?
RG: The most surprising finding is the strong rebound in ad pricing in 2009. While many in the online advertising
space expected pricing to improve in 2009 relative to the difficult economic environment and underlying trends in
2008, the force with which pricing rebounded was a surprise. As publishers are continuing to adopt ad revenue
optimization solutions we are seeing publishers achieve higher and higher pricing points for their non-guaranteed
inventory.
AdExchanger.com: I noticed the focus in your report is "premium" publishers. First, what is meant by
"premium publisher"? And do you have any insight on non-guaranteed inventory for publishers other than
"premium"?
RG: Premium publishers are US-based publishers with over 100 million non-guaranteed ad impressions per
month. PubMatic no longer reports on pricing trends for non-premium publishers.
AdExchanger.com: Given current pricing momentum and what you're seeing from your clients, any
thoughts on what's to come in 2010 in terms of pricing?
RG: We expect to see continued pricing strength in 2010. Advertisers are returning to the market and nonguaranteed advertising via ad networks and exchanges continues to take market share. In addition, some of the
key trends identified in the report, such as the usage of audience data, growth in real time bidding (RTB), and rise
of demand side platforms (DSPs) will only continue into 2010.
By John Ebbert
January 20, 2010 – 9:28 am
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CEO Goel Discusses PubMatic Premier Platform, Defines
Its Version Of The Sell-Side Platform (SSP)
February 17, 2010 – 10:16 am
Today, PubMatic announced that it is offering a next rev in its publisher-side
yield optimization platform which notably includes "guaranteed inventory yield
management" and possibly puts it into competition with Yieldex, which has
been working the direct sales optimization side for publishers for a while now.
See the release.
AdExchanger.com spoke to PubMatic's CEO Rajeev Goel about the
implications of this iteration of the PubMatic platform.
AdExchanger.com: Is this the PubMatic answer for the Supply-Side or
Sell-Side Platform (SSP)?
PubMatic pioneered the ad network optimization space with its founding in
2006. However, it's clear that publishers need much more than just ad network optimization. As the market has
evolved, media buying has evolved, and new opportunities such as audience data and real-time bidding (RTB)
have emerged, publishers need a much more advanced platform for managing their ad revenue and brands. It's
fair to refer to this as a sell-side platform (SSP).
The SSP of the future will manage both guaranteed inventory (what a publisher's sales force sells directly) and
non-guaranteed inventory (monetized via ad networks and exchanges). But it will do far more than just sell this
inventory - it will integrate audience data from third parties, it will actively manage the publisher's brand and protect
from malware and poor quality ads, it will provide an integrated yield curve across both the direct and indirect sales
channel, it will provide a controlled RTB environment for the publisher, and more. We think that the new PubMatic
Premier is the first offering in the market to provide publishers with all of this and we're looking forward to
expanding it as well.
Can you expand on how PubMatic's platform manages "Guaranteed
Inventory Yield Management" and provides insights? Any examples?
Traditionally the non-guaranteed sales channel (ad networks and exchanges) has been distinct and separate from
the guaranteed ad sales channel (publisher's sales force selling direct). However, that's changing and we're
coming into an environment where there is overlap in terms of the buyers and price points for these two channels.
Audience buying and RTB are two key trends that are driving this. As a result, publishers need the ability to
manage an integrated yield curve across both channels as well as pricing and inventory insights to make the right
ad serving decisions for their entire business.
There are many examples of this in play. For example, a publisher might sell directly a campaign for $6. And there
might be an RTB buyer that is paying $8 for a certain set of impressions. Without proper yield management across
guaranteed and non-guaranteed channels, most publishers would sell the $6 campaign first and the $8 campaign
second because they manage the two channels separately. Obviously that will leave money on the table - our
solution manages across channels and finds these opportunities, which can yield 10-20% higher revenue across
the ENTIRE business.
Here's another example we see often - a major publisher has a 25% sell-through rate for direct sales but yet underdelivers on many campaigns, again leaving revenue on the table. This is often caused by the publisher not having
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good audience and traffic insight across both the guaranteed and non-guaranteed sales channels, so they're not
able to see these opportunities before budget expires or allocate inventory properly. Our solution manages
holistically across sales channels to close this gap.
How/When will this product get rolled out? Do existing publisher clients get this automatically?
We are rolling this out in stages, and working with beta partners in the process as we do this. Some of this
functionality is included in our existing agreements with publishers - for example our Data Firewall, Creative
Review Dashboard, and audience reporting solutions, which bring together audience data from many leading
players in the market such as BlueKai, eXelate, RapLeaf and more. Other functionality will be available under a
separate agreement that the publisher can opt for.
Our mission is to provide publishers with the greatest control of their ad revenue and brand, and we believe that
PubMatic Premier is a huge step forward in providing publishers with an advanced solution to do exactly that.
February 17, 2010 – 10:16 am
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Rubicon Project Announces Real-Time Bidding And
Publisher Controls
April 14, 2010 – 3:22 pm
The Rubicon Project announced that it will be launching real-time
bidding functionality to a limited group of demand-side partners in
addition to providing controls to Rubicon Project publishers. Read
the release.
Rubicon Project's VP of Marketing Kara Weber discussed the news
and its implications.
AdExchanger.com: When will the beta begin with your demand-side partners and what do you expect the
initial impression levels will be as in - will it include all available Rubicon Project inventory? Or do
publishers need to opt-in first, for example?
KW: Our real-time bidding technology is live in alpha testing with a limited number of publisher partners. We are
launching RTB technology now that Permission Control technology is in place to ensure that publishers can accept
real-time bids safely, efficiently and with the rules of engagement between them and demand partners made clear
to all parties. Among the Permission Control settings for RTB are, yes, opt-in (by partner), and assigning which
inventory will be made available to bidders in the Protected RTB program, among many others. We will be adding
more publishers to the program in coming weeks.
Why is real-time bidding good for publishers?
Publishers should be able to access all sources of demand in the digital ad ecosystem - not only ad networks and
exchanges, but DSPs and others - who are buying inventory in all sorts of ways: content/contextual buys, site
buys, audience segments, cookies and the latest, RTB. With effective channel management and the right
protections in place, publishers can leverage channel management technology to drive revenue - and regain
balance in the digital advertising ecosystem.
Can you discuss the uniqueness of the rules that protect publishers in the Rubicon Project's RTB beta
program in comparison to other publisher yield optimization solutions?
the Rubicon Project is strictly a publisher-side platform; as defined in our manifesto, Principles of a REVVolution,
we are committed to providing efficient and safe access to all sources of demand, and delivering technology
protections against the risks of "black-boxed" and imbalanced arbitrage-driven systems that prevent publishers
from recognizing the true value of their inventory.
To deliver on these promises, the Rubicon Project is innovating more and stronger technology than any other
player in the marketplace to deliver publishers protection against pricing erosion, data leakage and channel
conflict. These protections are enforced in two ways with our Protected
RTB program.


First, publishers can leverage Permission Control 2.0 technology by adjusting the series of levers within
the REVV interface (around transparency, geography, site, ad size and more) to specify which partners
may access their inventory, how and at what price. The technology strictly enforces these settings across
all transactions on the REVV platform;
Second, the Rubicon Project is the only platform - publisher-side or otherwise - that has strict business
rules in place with real-time bidding buyers (including Turn, DataXu, AppNexus and MediaMath, among
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others) that govern access to inventory and transactions on the Rubicon Project's REVV for publishers
platform.
These publisher settings and partner agreements are enforced in every transaction that runs through the REVV ad
technology platform. No other player in the industry has this level of protection in place; we truly aim to level the
playing field for publishers.
By John Ebbert
Share It!
April 14, 2010 – 3:22 pm
272
Rubicon Project Research Showing Q4 2009 CPM Surge;
Discusses Drivers
January 25, 2010 – 11:06 pm
The Rubicon Project released it's Online Advertising Market
Report for Q4 2009 and said that CPMs were showing
considerable strength as "CPMs across the Rubicon 20 Index
have risen by an average of 34 percent vs. Q3 2009." Read the
release. And, download the report here (sign-up required).
Rubicon Project VP of Marketing, Kara Weber, discussed the
report with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: Can you share some data that shows
audience targeted buys, in particular, were a key driver of
increased CPMs for the "Rubicon 20"?
KW: At the end of Q409 more than 10 percent of advertising dollars flowing through the Rubicon Project's REVV
Marketplace were being spent exclusively on audience-targeted buys, compared to 5 percent at the start of Q409.
There is also a chart highlighting percentage of revenue from Audience-targeted buys in this blog post.
Comparing Q4 of last year for the Rubicon 20, what does it look like in terms of CPMs?
The Rubicon 20 Index saw 17.7% growth Q4 '09 over Q4 '08.
What are the key "major news events, especially around celebrity activities" in which Rubicon Project saw
an increased demand?
The events we identified were the same as what the rest of the market saw, including the passing of Brittany
Murphy and reports on Tiger Woods' infidelity. These major new stories drove consumers to celebrity gossip sites
en mass in Q409.
By John Ebbert
January 25, 2010 – 11:06 pm
For more,
visit AdExchanger.com.
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