The ‘Platforms’ Category
Yahoo!'s Right Media is announcing today new publisher controls for real-time bidding (RTB) on display ad inventory through its exchange. The company says controls include:
"Inventory opt-in: Sellers can choose the specific types of their inventory they wish to offer via real-time bidding. (The default setting is to opt out of RTB.)"
"Reserve Prices: To help manage sales channel conflict, sellers can set reserve prices for different types of inventory sold on specific channels, and set specific reserve prices for both RTB and non-RTB buyers."
Read more on the Right Media blog here.
Ramsey McGrory, Head of Right Media Exchange, discussed a bit more about today's announcement and its implications.
AdExchanger.com: Just to recap from a buy side perspective, real-time bidding is now available through Right Media Exchange and it has been available for a while. Correct?
RM: It has been available for a while. Q1 of last year we announced the DSP (Demand-Side Platform) pilot. Part of that was holding company agencies were getting access to real-time bidding (RTB). The intent there was - from the Yahoo! perspective - to use those significant agency relationships as a way to evaluate what had to be done with RTB from a feature/functionality perspective and actually get “water” going through the pipes.
The “plumbing” has been there for about two and a half years and the DSP pilot is where we've really started to ramp it. Last year, we started to surface inventory. Then, we figured out all the problems on the publisher side. At the same time, the buyers were figuring out all of their problems.
For example, it's very difficult for a DSP or an agency trading desk to consistently respond to 35,000 QPS (queries per second) no matter the stated SLA (service level agreement) because their infrastructure may not be able to handle that load or they may not have enough data to have a point-of-view on all of the different inventory.
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Scott Grimes is CEO of Cardlytics, a transaction marketing technology company.
AdExchanger.com: How is your Capital One experience coming in handy as you look to grow Cardlytics?
SG: Capital One provided a fantastic example of the power of the data in the financial services industry. We are enabling the financial institutions to leverage its data to the benefit of the Financial Institution (FI), their customers and the merchants.
What problem is Cardlytics solving? -for merchants, banks and consumers.
Cardlytics is enabling Financial Institutions (FIs) to monetize the value of their transaction data in a way that benefits their customers and the merchants - while completely protecting consumer privacy and not requiring the FI’s transaction data to leave their premises. Merchants get access to a huge base of consumers (we currently reach 16M households and will reach 75M households by Q1 2012) who receive rich, relevant rewards that are extremely simple to engage with and redeem using the payment solution they use every day.
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Steve Johnson is CEO of ChoiceStream, a personalized marketing and advertising solutions provider.
Yesterday, the company announced its custom audience targeting platform, CRUNCH. Read the release. Johnson discussed the announcement and his company.
AdExchanger.com: Can you talk a little bit about ChoiceStream's beginnings and how it has evolved? And - where did the name come from?
SJ: I created ChoiceStream 10 years ago when I realized that the volume of accessible content would quickly frustrate consumers if there were no intelligent way to help find what was relevant to them. We started working with major media brands to present relevant TV show and movie recommendations to consumers based on what they were watching, rating and purchasing. ChoiceStream’s ability to predict future intent based on actual behavior has transformed how people watch TV on the U-Verse and DISH services; how they purchase apparel, books, and electronics at Zappos, Borders and Tesco; and how they discover upcoming concerts and events at Ticketmaster/LiveNation.
The name ChoiceStream came from the term ‘clickstream,’ but recognizes that a ‘click’ is only one kind of choice a consumer makes. Buying a product, sharing a video, or using an iPhone app, for example, are other kinds of choices a consumer makes. ChoiceStream learns from them all.
What problem is ChoiceStream solving today?
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PaidContent's David Kaplan has a look at the one-year anniversary of Google's acquisition of Invite Media with its co-founder Zach Weinberg who tells Kaplan that Invite has "largely been 'left alone' in terms of conducting its business." Read it. At yesterday's Conversational Media Summit, Google exec Neal Mohan said, "Invite Media has been one of the fastest growing acquisitions that Google has ever made." Read it.
AdExchanger.com asked the following question:
"What has been the impact of the Invite Media acquisition by Google a year ago? Any surprises?"
A selection of responses from industry execs is below:
- Curt Viebranz, CEO, Ad Summos
- Rich Astley, MEC, Managing Partner, Digital Trading
- Joe Zawadzki, CEO, MediaMath
- Bill Wise, CEO, MediaBank
- Jed Nahum, Global Channel Director, Microsoft Advertising Exchange
- Megan Pagliuca, Vice President of Display Media, Merkle
- Mike Shehan, CEO, SpotXchange
- Martin Kelly, Co-Founder, Infectious Media
- Eric Wheeler, CEO, 33Across
- Mike Baker, CEO, DataXu
- Andrew Pancer, COO, Media6Degrees
Curt Viebranz, CEO, Ad Summos
"No real surprises here. I think it was a great pickup for Google at a very reasonable price. The combination has clearly driven significant growth in RTB over the past year. What is surprising is how little Google has done over the past year to unify its disparate ad offerings. Look for a lot more to happen there in the next twelve months. Everyone who is staking a claim to part of the value chain will be trying to figure out Google’s moves. The DSP marketplace is still incredibly crowded; one has to expect a shakeout there in the next twelve months. The pace of change in this ecosystem leads me to say that Google’s acquisition of Invite will look far less significant a year from now than it did a year ago."
Rich Astley, MEC, Managing Partner, Digital Trading
"The biggest surprise to me is the fact a lot of people assumed the Invite acquisition would be the start of an industry wide spending spree on DSP technologies. Well, a year later and that just hasn't happened. I think the reason for that is twofold: 1) The market has a lot more head-room for growth and consequently higher valuations in the long run and 2) I think its those technology platforms that can prove data driven media buying is a truly cross platform opportunity will prevail, and that’s still some time away yet.
What I think Google’s acquisition of Invite Media did ignite, was the start of the platform strategy. As the shift from relationship based sales to automated trading becomes a reality, the operating language for the marketplace has becomes strategically significant on the buy and sell side alike."
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John Squire is Chief Strategy Officer of Coremetrics, an IBM company.
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AdExchanger.com: Why should marketers care about "big data"?
JS: I think that marketers have spent a tremendous amount of time trying to figure out what data is really helpful to them. There's tons of it. And, there are certain people inside the organization with the propellers on their head that are like, "I can dig through this and find some really unique characteristics of our customers."
But, you hear some of the leading marketers in this space saying, "Look. I started clustering my customers. I used five, 10 or 30 vectors, and with that I was able to discern there are certain classes of customers that interact very differently with certain types of marketing treatments and will accelerate my business if I can just go out and reach them." So, a few companies have figured that out.
But, most marketing departments say, "I can barely handle the performance data that I get back on my marketing programs, let alone understand all these data points about the customers, the audience and the market."
So "big data" is that promise of, "If we can harness the big data that's actually available inside the organization, we'll find out a lot more about our customer set and the market. And it will actually point us in the direction of where we should place the next marketing dollar we have."
Whereas two years ago, the refrain was, "Should we have taken that marketing dollar from that specific channel?"
I think the problem, though, is that the data sits in many different places. It's not a skill-set of a marketer to go, "How am I going to pull all these together?" Excel doesn't pull all of this together for you...
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American Express OPEN announced its new AdManager product powered by display ad, demand-side platform AdReady. The companies claim that AdManager simplifies digital ad campaigns "by offering a start-to-finish platform that tackles every facet of building and sustaining campaigns, from creating ads to determining where they will appear." Read the release.
American Express OPEN vp Robert Ciccone discussed the announcement and its implications.
AdExchanger.com: Why is advertising in particular an important part of what OPEN wants to offer its customers?
RC: We're looking to help small businesses and help them do more business, and the number one small business need that we've repeatedly heard is, "Help me get more customers" - in a variety of different ways. We know that online advertising is growing, and online itself is an increasingly important medium in which consumers consume information. There is a lot of growth in marketing and marketing services online, and we want to help the small businesses identify best-in-class solutions and enter this space.
A lot of SMBs want to focus on the local advertising angle. Is this a solution – display - for local advertising?
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Yesterday, search and display media buying platform company Efficient Frontier acquired Context Optional which the company said "expands Efficient Frontier’s social media offering [and] will combine the company’s advertising campaign management and optimization with Context Optional’s page management platform," according to the release. Read it.
Efficient CEO David Karnstedt discussed the implications of the acquisition.
AdExchanger.com: Why is this the right time for this acquisition?
DK: Digital marketing is in the midst of a dramatic shift with the explosion of social media -- much like we saw with Search 10 years ago. Social media marketing is expected to grow from $2.1 billion this year to $8.3 billion in 2015, according to a study released this week from BIA/Kelsey. Efficient Frontier launched its Facebook ad platform in September of last year and we've seen tremendous client interest since then. Additionally, we have been working with Context Optional as a partner as clients have been asking for a joint ad/page management solution so we thought this was a good time to join forces officially.
How does this mesh with your search and display efforts specifically? Or do you consider it a separate product offering?
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Is a demand-side platform next for IBM? It would seem logical.
Check out today's latest IBM news as its Coremetrics unit is planting itself right in the middle of the media buying and planning business with an analytics product called Coremetrics Lifestyle. "Commerce" (meaning e-commerce) marketers will get to track it all according to the press release:
"From customer acquisition to retention, marketers can make the most of their interactions with prospects across all online marketing channels, including email, display advertising, search marketing and social media, based on real customer behavior."
See a sexy screenshot of the analytics dasboard - you'll get the idea.
Yes, it's that up-and-down the purchase funnel stuff ("lifecycle" says IBM) that everyone is talking about. IBM's Coremetrics unit is analyzing cross-channel, too.
You can go up-and-down and you can go across in ads.
Given the analytics capabilities, it would seem that an actual buying function would make sense and take a little bit more friction out of the system with an integrated attribution and buying offering. Enter a DSP. Grease those traffic acquisition costs I say!
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Mark Hughes is CEO of C3 Metrics, an online advertising attribution company.
AdExchanger.com: What are some of the key learnings that you had as VP of Marketing at Half.com (sold to eBay for $300 million in 2000), that have come in handy at C3 Metrics?
Both eBay and half.com embraced a data-driven culture for media buying and customer acquisition. Sometimes it was a pressure cooker, but pressure makes diamonds.
What problem is C3 metrics solving?
Today’s ad tracking systems are predominantly the same legacy systems from the late ‘90s…giving 100% conversion credit to the last-click or last-view.
Example: if four Internet ads contribute to a transaction, current tracking systems allocate entire credit to the very last ad, completely ignoring the first three...even though they drove your revenue.
Zero credit to revenue drivers…100% credit to the last ad. It’s frightening.
C3 solves this problem with a SaaS attribution model, collecting and attributing credit to media sources as Originators, Assists, and Converters--transaction-by-transaction, in real-time.
The elegance of C3 is its decision engine…taking thousands of transactions, and making the complex simple and actionable. Instead of grueling weeks of analysis, using C3’s decision engine, it takes minutes.
How do you view the attribution competitive landscape? What are the different silos?
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Today, Google announced performance results for Google remarketing offering in AdWords in comparison to standard display advertising. Also, the company announced the pending availability of new enhancements to its remarketing capabilities offered through AdWords on The Google Display Network. This includes adding Teracent to the remarketing toolkit, the company's dynamic creative technology acquired in 2009. Read more on Google's Inside AdWords blog.
Brad Bender is director of product management for the Google Display Network. He spoke about the update to GDN's remarketing/retargeting capabilities.
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AdExchanger.com: What sort of timing can we expect for launch of enhanced re‑targeting capabilities such as Teracent? Do the updates affect those that are buying through the API or just AdWords?
BB: We don't generally comment on future timing. With dynamic ads technology integration, we're currently in beta testing, and presumably, if that all goes well, within a quarter (3 months) time frame we will have more general availability. I can't specifically say when it will be available.
So, specifically [the dynamic creative update] was intended for AdWords in terms of what I'm talking about, but the reality is that Teracent is a platform technology that could be leveraged through a third party ad call, and, that type of combination can be leveraged by other players in the market across inventory that they might buy across the Double Click Ad Exchange. The work would be done on their end. The integration itself will be built into Teracent, so if they have their own re‑marketing list they should be able to do a similar type of integration.
What we're trying to do is really simplify it so that any marketer can use re‑marketing. It's democratizing access to this powerful technology.
Is Google going to be providing on a one‑off or ala carte basis Teracent technologies to DSP's and ad networks that want to use it within their own systems? Or are you doing that already today?
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