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Programmatic I/O: Quotable Moments

rishad-pioMore than 300 marketers, agencies, and platform companies gathered at the St. Regis Martin in San Francisco on Monday for AdExchanger's Programmatic I/O conference. 

Below is a selection of comments made by speakers throughout the day, as recorded by AdExchanger's editorial staff, including Judith Aquino, Kimberly Maul, and David Kaplan. 

Andrew Casale, VP Strategy, Casale Media

"Browsers taking privacy into their own hands is a scary proposition for the space. The fate of ad exchanges is not linked to the cookie though."

Rajeev Goel, CEO of PubMatic

"There is a misconception that everything will be programmatic. I think 50% is about right. Not every campaign or every marketer objective requires programmatic. There are a bunch of challenges: people, process, compensation strategies. I do think we're at the tipping point for the next S curve, which is private marketplaces and private exchanges. We saw last year that 1% of the media on our platform was done via private marketplaces and in Q1, it was over 5%."

Dave Chiang, Vice President of Monetization, CBS Interactive

"We are hoping to get more of a commitment from the buy side. We're worried about them leaving the relationship if something didn't perform to expectations."

Scott Knoll, CEO, Integral Ad Science

"There are three levers or pillars to the ad business: the message itself, the right audience, the right place. Industry has focused on audience. But if you don't have the first two right, you're wasting your money.

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Salesforce Works Toward Building 'Customer Companies'

benioff-feb13-usethis

Salesforce.com added new mobile customer service solutions to its offerings, the company announced this week. Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff spoke about the new focus for the company, and demonstrated the new features, at an event at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York on Tuesday.

The company currently offers three cloud-based products: the Marketing Cloud, which offers social media monitoring and marketing support; the Sales Cloud, for sales force automation and CRM; and the Service Cloud, for customer service, support, and help desks.

In order to help its clients service consumers who are on the go, Salesforce introduced the new Service Cloud Mobile offering this week, expanding on the Service Cloud. It includes a mobile chat capability and new co-browsing technology that allows agents to assist customers on mobile devices via a web browser, helping them with whatever website issue they have.

Additionally, Salesforce introduced Service Cloud Touch, which is optimized for mobile devices and allows service agents to manage and resolve cases on the go, via a variety of mobile and tablet devices. Lastly, the company shared its new branded mobile communities that allow customers to connect with industry experts, peers, or company representatives, to solve a variety of issues.

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Facebook's Open Graph And The Marketer At AllFacebook Conference

In a panel discussion at Tuesday's AllFacebook Conference, platform providers offered their insights on Facebook's Open Graph and what marketers should think about when it comes to their social media plans.

Facebook describes "Open Graph" on its developer site as helping "people tell stories about their lives with the apps they use. It provides developers with the opportunity to deeply integrate their app into the core Facebook experience, which enables distribution and growth." Ultimately, Marketers want to figure out how to use the "gobs" of Open Graph data to target their messaging and campaigns.

And a key theme of the panel discussion was how rapidly Facebook's platform evolves as, no doubt, the social giant's throngs of engineers and product warriors are constantly spinning the dials looking for the next best thing whether it's user experience, the Open Graph, making better ads or apps - or all of the above.  How is a "partner" company to keep up?  The  panelists, which were from a range of startups as well as CRM agency Merkle, seemed to say that you can make a living in Facebook's wake.

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Y Combinator Ad Innovation Conference Yields New Startups Focused On Ads

Y CombinatorThe ad tech startup factory is alive and pulsing in Silicon Valley!

Yesterday, tech incubation company and fund, Y Combinator, produced its Ad Innovation Conference in Mountain View, California. 19 ad tech startups presented themselves in various stages of development. A few companies kept their presentation off-the-record, but most "opened the kimono" in 4-minute, company presentations.

Y Combinator chief Paul Graham began the conference by identifying the big trends impacting the digital economy beginning with the world of the tablet and Apple.

He stated unequivocally, "Apple is going to take over the world" as he believed that Apple is in a position to continue to take market share with superior technology and user experience - and at some point it could drop its price points to complete the world domination. For Graham, the only question is what happens to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Continuing his "trend list," Graham identified "the cloud":  "All the data is going to live in the cloud." Yes, the computer hardware you have in your home or sitting on your desk will no longer be necessary as you'll have an internet connection to some big, beefy data center that has sliced a little piece of cloud computing pie for your digital needs.

Big trend #3: Peer-to-peer. This buzztrend has been around for a while -especially with Bit Torrent and the like. But, Graham's point is that the ability to communicate with each other, peer-to-peer - "things that were hardwired issues in the past are no longer."

Trend #4 - Good News! - there will be more startups! Graham said that the world of business is going to change such that it isn't big megacorps getting the job done, it's tiny companies that are interconnected. Startups! And more and more of the brains of the world will float from colleges and universities to the world of the startups.

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Context Still Matters Says NY Times SVP Nisenholtz At Digital Media Summit

Digital Media SummitIf your favorite stars are in the digital advertising technology world (and why wouldn't they be?), then last week's Digital Media Summit in New York City was a star-studded affair. Co-produced by LUMA Partners and MediaLink, several hundred attendees came together to hob nob and put their best foot forward to potential acquirers or their intermediaries. In addition, attendees could choose from a smorgasbord of compelling panels throughout the day.

At the beginning of breakout sessions on Wednesday, one panel on big content and the state of news online offered some interesting insights in a discussion led by The Business Insider's Henry Blogdget. Panel members included Federated Media's John Battelle, Press+'s Gordon Crovitz (formerly of The Wall Street Journal) and The New York Times SVP of Digital Operations Martin Nisenholtz, who is also temporarily "riding herd" at About.com until a new CEO can be found.

Demand-side platforms, ad networks and exchanges were among the topics touched on and The Times' Nisenholtz provided his big brand perspective on innovation in digital ads. Suffice it to say, content is still king from these publishers points-of-view -and they're wary of the automation and innovation eating away at their businesses.

From the panel...

HENRY BLODGET: Aren't we basically in a world where ad prices are going to go to zero? And aren't we screwed as a result?

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Google VP Mohan Speaks Display Ads, Invite Media At Conversational Marketing Summit

Neal Mohan at CMSThe Conversational Marketing Summit continued for a second day at the Hudson Theater in New York City as Internet Week hurtled along.

In the late morning, "The Charlie Rose of New Media" - a.k.a. Federated Media's John Battelle - proceeded with his long list of interviewees as Google VP of Product Neal Mohan became his latest contestant.

Battelle hit just about every topic possible in 25 minutes which helped provide a good topline on Google strategy - at least as good as you're going to get in a public forum.

To begin, Mohan addressed the $200 billion number his company sees for display "in a few short years" saying, "Display means all formats and channels where the advertising is associated with content": video, mobile, graphical display, IPTV, tablets, etc.

Mohan believed "branded dollars" coming to this $200 billion bucket would be both digital native and TV dollars coming over to digital and he addressed the importance of audience buying, data and real-time decisioning adding that Google's vision is not just top of funnel dollars - ironic in that Google's core ad business is search and bottom-of-the-funnel.

Looking at today's disparity between time spent with online media versus offline media, Mohan said he saw a $50 billion gap meaning -he thinks online should be $75 billion today not $25 billion and attributed the challenges created by media fragmentation, its friction and the "deterioriaton of ROI" to the reason for the significant lag.

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Demand-Side Versus Sell-Side: BMO Capital Markets' Digital Ads Panel Yields Differing Views On Innovation Trends

BMO Capital MarketsLast Thursday, BMO Capital produced their 3rd annual Advertising & Marketing Services Conference which took place at the Grand Hyatt in New York City. An extensive schedule of public and private companies presented their ideas, products and services which included a panel discussion with MediaBank CEO Bill Wise, [x+1] CEO John Nardone, AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley and MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki. Moderated by this writer, the group exchanged their views on BMO analyst Dan Salmon's Digital Marketing Hub thesis (see PDF) and the digital ad tech business, in general.

The four panelists did not disappoint the crowd which was comprised of public markets investors who were trying to guess, if not understand, the next big moves and trends that may affect their investment plans.

Among the highlights of the panel was in response to a question about how the sell-side - represented by companies like Yahoo! and Aol - is addressing the bias toward buy-side innovation in the digital ad tech ecosystem. To begin, Wise and O'Kelley squared off: Wise seeing buy-side innovation providing demand players one-sided advantage; and O'Kelley seeing his real-time ad platform and Microsoft Exchange partner (and investor) finding new success for publishers.

WISE: "I always like to start off by stating a couple of facts - that all the innovation has gone in to the demand-side ad targeting space has not been proven that it can increase yield or revenue to major publishers and the supply-side of the business which kind of proves out the fact that too many intermediaries are taking too much margin. So, a lot of the efficiency that is created on the demand-side is not flowing through to the principals of the business."

O'KELLEY: "That's not true. That's definitely not the case. As I told you outside, Microsoft is seeing that the exchange has produced higher CPMs and higher yield than their premium salesforce."

WISE: "OK, so we've proven that Microsoft's sales team is ineffective and AppNexus isn't."

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Live From Gridley & Co. Conference: RTB And Premnant Inventory

In a morning panel at the Gridley & Co. Conference in New York City moderated by Gridley's Pratik Patel, panelists from the data-driven ecosystem paused just long enough amidst the swirl of funding announcements to provide a few nuggets on the momentum for real-time bidded inventory.

Setting the stage for the discussion, real-time ad platform AppNexus' CTO Mike Nolet said his company's technology saw 8 billion RTB'd impressions for sale in one day towards the end of December. He said this was a huge difference compared to January 2010.

Yahoo!'s Right Media Exchange head Ramsey McGrory reiterated that his company has been in the RTB space the past 18 months, but that real-time bidding (RTB)  in its current form across the ecosystem is “lopsided” adding;

“Publishers are engaged it in a way that they don't necessarily know what it does to the market or what trade-offs there are. There's not enough evidence to confirm that the higher CPMs that publishers are generating are simply remarketing impressions and advertisers didn't want to pay more for it, or whether the buyers are buying not only the media, but the data that comes with it.”

Michael Barrett, CEO of AdMeld, predictably countered given his company's sell-side bet in the RTB space:

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