The ‘Event Coverage’ Category
The 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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If 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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The 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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Last 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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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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The ad tech startup factory is alive and pulsing in Silicon Valley!
