@JR
I think what you’re getting at here is the classic marketing funnel. So yes, brands absolutely want and need to work the full funnel online. Today they just have more tools for working the middle to the bottom vs. the top to the middle.

@Darren Herman
1. Agree that not everything for brands needs to be futures. Brands can and will do some spot buying, but I believe the majority of spend will still be planned in advance.

2. There could also be forward market in non-standard executions - there already is really - although I would remind everyone of my disclaimer in the first paragraph that non-standard, non-exchange traded forward contracts are not technically “futures” - one of the trackbacks clearly missed that.

3. This is a great question (although given the strong ratings Moody’s gave many soon-to-be toxic assets this arguably isn’t a critical piece of infrastructure). There will need to be automated assurance that inventory provided in fulfillment of a contract meets the agreed specifications, but I think that’s a bit different than what Moody’s claimed to provide. I think this objective spec-checking service could be provided by the exchange itself or by a third party, but I think assessments of “value” will be hard to do from a third-party perspective as they vary based on the counterparty (the “subjective” discussion in the article).

@ Michael Andrew
I agree that large publishers are more likely to be early primary sellers, but (to your question about how smaller publishers can participate) I also think there’s a market for intermediaries who have the meta-forecasting and delivery management capabilities to sell futures, delivering an aggregation of inventory from smaller publishers (or of smaller blocks from large publishers). Also want to make the point that both spot and futures markets are critical. Definitely not making the argument that the spot market isn’t tremendously valuable, just that it’s an incomplete solution.

As you pointed out the difficulty will be excluding the transient and client specific data which makes the RTB environment so valuable. Often this data is time sensitive and unique to the Brand's intelligence (think re-marketing).

As advertisers price this correctly it should increase the yield for publishers across the board. If we look to the Google example it is a completely live and dynamic market that has dramatically risen in CPM pricing over the years as advertisers learned the value of the inventory. If publishers see the same yield increase from the live environment it could hamper futures acquisition.

The other issue I'm not sure how to deal with is the long tail. How can the brand buyers lock down inventory that is happening across the long tail of sites? Even if they can take care of the major publishers the aggregate reach and impression volume of the long tail might be as high as 80% of total volume. Is this something that would have to be guaranteed by the exchange itself?

A few things:

1. I do think you can have brand dollars within a spot market. Not everything you need to do for brands needs to be a futures market.

2. I see a futures market around non-standardized creative units (i.e. takeovers, dominations, etc)

3. In this ecosystem, who plays Moody's?

Darren

A futures market driven primarily by brand advertisers would certainly be interesting; one can imagine a brand buying impressions on a futures basis, then upon delivery of the ads, launching an immediate follow-up campaign via the spot markets. The follow-up campaign would be optimized, by focusing on the audiences in which the futures campaign saw greatest traction (as measured by engagement with the ad, a visit to the brand's site after viewing the ad, etc). Assuming they could determine the most interested audiences, could that be attractive for a brand advertiser?