Is It A Pony Or A Hand Puppet? Enhancing Brand Safety Through Real-Time Bidding
March 11, 2010 – 2:42 pm
"Data-Driven Thinking" is a column written by members of the media community and containing fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today's column is written by Ajay Sravanapudi, CEO at LucidMedia.
“If it is in fact a hand puppet, which finger is the head of the pony?” This question nicely sums up the brand safety fears while running a display campaign. In my last column, I explored the recent demand-side platform (DSP) trend focusing on its potential benefit to agencies. This month, I want to look more closely at one specific aspect of the DSP movement: brand safety in real-time bid (RTB) inventory.
Real-time bidding is the latest positive evolutionary change sweeping the display advertising industry this year. Despite its promise of efficiency and scale, many buyers view RTB inventory as potentially brand unsafe. Contrary to these expectations, we have found that, with the right technology, RTB is the most effective and efficient means of procuring brand-safe inventory at scale. This is so because (a) impression bid requests come with a lot of useful data attached and (b) the DSP can use this impression-level data to filter for brand safety in real-time. Much of the impression level data can be used with minimal effort to implement a poor man’s brand safe filter like geographic, site level, day parting, etc. Any DSP worth the price of admission should implement this kind of minimum filtering. However, this is just scratching the surface. What is really needed for true brand safety is technology that can perform a deep semantic analysis at the page-level.
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