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Please Welcome, The AOL Advertising Exchange, BidPlace

It's official.

AOL's long-rumored entry into the advertising exchange business is here and covered in today's edition of MediaWeek by Mike Shields among other online news outlets.

According to the release:

"BidPlace will allow advertisers to submit bids for CPM, CPC and CPA advertising on AOL, on select partner sites and on Platform-A’s third-party network, which combined reaches 90% of the online audience, according to the August 2008 comScore Media Metrix report."

BidPlace? Hmmm. We're surprised they wanted to use this name - kinda generic. But, it's AOL. It must have been vetted, right? (bidplace.com points to a domain squatter.)

As Mike Shields points out, BidPlace is an ad exchange, remnant play and gives AOL another opportunity to increase revenues of their massive, non-premium, remnant inventory.

DR marketers will be happy to try and get a crack at the huge audience. But, the target audience may need to scroll down below the fold to see the ad.

Hopefully, the exchange model's transparency overcomes the remnant concerns for brand and DR advertisers.

David Kaplan at Paid Content provides the most in-depth overview of BidPlace in his interview with Lynda Clarizio, Platform-A’s president, and Eric Bosco, Platform-A’s chief product and U.S. operations officer.

Bosco is quoted as saying the following regarding the "big difference" between BidPlace and other exchanges:

"The thing that I feel really differentiates our offering from what others are going to have in the marketplace is that we’re actually exposing all the power of AdLearn optimizer. For example, if you’re running a CPA campaign, with a simple set of tags you could have AdLearn discover the best places on our network to place your media and meet your ROI without having to compute all those individually."

While it's true that no one else has the AdLearn optimizer, most ad exchange and networks have an optimizer of some sort that allows budget to be spent across a range of placements and then optimized according to the best or target performance.

One other quote points to our continuing call for a cross-campaign analytics tool along the lines of proposed Microsoft's proposed engagement mapping which was released to Atlas customers in beta form, yesterday.

"Clarizio: “I don’t agree that branding is not viable online, that you can’t adequately measure it and that there’s not a lot of demand from the advertising community."

At the very least, tying display to search marketing success - whether organic or paid - would help the brand guys show the benefit of branding online.

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