The ‘Publishers’ Category
Victor Wong is CEO of PaperG, a local, online advertising technology company.
Wong discussed his company's growth and offering with AdExchanger including trends he's seeing in the local advertising marketplace.
AdExchanger.com: What are some of the trends you're seeing today which you didn't expect when you started the company?
When we first started the company, the company was founded to figure out local, online advertising. What that landscape looked like three years ago is very different from today. A few different trends, in particular, have formed our product roadmap over that time.
One is real‑time bidding (RTB) which didn't even exist when we first started the company. For small advertisers, RTB is huge because it allows cheaper and more efficient ad buying at smaller increments. That's something that we couldn't have imagined when we first started.
Another thing that didn't exist - which we ended up building out - was dynamic creative optimization. When we first started the company, it was problematic enough having to require advertisers to have an ad created, let alone try and make multiple versions in order to find out which was the best performing.
Mobile is another big trend that we didn't imagine when we first started the company. It has enabled more, highly targetable inventory similar to retargeting which has become a more integral piece of our strategy in terms of enabling websites and for search retargeting, which obviously has a high degree of efficiency - especially for smaller advertisers.
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Jeremy Steinberg is VP, Digital Sales & Business Development, FOX News Network.
Late last week, Steinberg offered an update to AdExchanger on his company's efforts in the online audience buying space.
AdExchanger.com: Last May, you discussed with AdExchanger.com some of the things you were doing on the product side to address audience buying. How has it worked out?
JS: Really well, and - within the next couple months - we're going to be rolling out a fully-revamped audience insights suite of services for our advertisers, which will provide enhanced targeting opportunities for audience, as well as context.
It’s equally important to marry the two together and is a key differentiator for us. This is a big investment in our business and in our future.
We've known for quite some time that we have by far the most engaged audience in news, and the numbers in comScore really speak to that. We're investing in new technology because we want to prove it to our advertisers that our advertising works.
We’re doubling down and offering robust segmentation of our audience so advertisers can dive in deep to reach their targets, or, even better, to find out who their ads are performing best against, and then optimizing accordingly.
Will the focus of this product be on PC-based display? Mobile, video?
It's focused on [PC-based] display to start. We're certainly going to explore expanding it to other channels down the road.
Any trends you can share that you’re seeing with display today in your business?
There's a lot going on in this area. There's the direct, and indirect.
On the direct side, we're seeing increased demand from the prior year, and one of the reasons for that increased demand is my team is out in the marketplace proving the value of our inventory. We're doing that through our investments in custom solutions, and in ad technology. We're talking about audience targeting about real‑time bidding. That's something that has been of keen interest to our clients.
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This week, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) , a not-for-profit trade organization that represents large, online publishers, will gather leaders together from the online publishing community for its annual summit in Coral Gables, Florida.
Pam Horan is President of the OPA and she discussed the OPA's upcoming event with AdExchanger.com as well as her association's initiatives (such as its "OPA ad units") and the state of the web publishing today.
AdExchanger.com: Looking into your crystal ball, what do you think might be some of publishers' takeaways from the upcoming OPA Summit?
PH: If we think about what's hot, I would say mobile. It's everything from thinking about how online publishers are delivering their content in compelling ways to understanding how advertising can be effective on thes platforms. Video has similar challenges with content and advertising - and then there's social. If we consider that the majority of top links that are shared are based on content from, and links to, OPA sites, OPA publishers put the media in social media. Without our members' content, there is no social.
Also, another takeaway may be the insights and opportunity that publishers are gaining from social. For example, we have Nate Richardson, who is the President of Gilt City, who will talk about social, local commerce. That is certainly something that is on the horizon potentially for some of the publishers: the intersection between commerce, content and social.
It seems like Facebook is social to a large degree. What is your sense of what online publishers are thinking regarding a monetization strategy via Facebook?
Let me start by saying that we did some research with Harris Interactive last year that looked at the connections that consumers have with different content online. What we wanted to do was understand the connections that consumers have, because if you think about when you wake up in the morning, the first place you may go - maybe you’ll go to the New York Times because you want to find out what's happening today in the news. From there, you may decide you're going to go to Yahoo Finance because you want to check out your stock portfolio. And from there, you're going to go to Facebook because you want to see what your friends are doing today. In that one web surfing session, you've just gone to three distinct environments: media sites, portal - in the case of Yahoo Finance - and then Facebook. And you're right, there's only one player really there. Obviously we're seeing an emergence of other types of tools that support that environment and are great for social like Twitter, Tumblr and so on. But they really own the landscape right now.
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Today, The Weather Channel Companies announced that David Kenny, former President of Akamai and CEO of Publicis agency Digitas, would become its Chairman and CEO and succeed Mike Kelly who will remain as a special adviser to Kenny and the Board. According to a press release, the owners of The Weather Channel Companies (Bain Capital, The Blackstone Group, and NBC Universal) said: "David brings a strong leadership background having served as chief executive at global companies across different aspects of the media industry. This experience gives him a deep understanding of the TV and digital business, and he has the leadership experience and vision to drive global initiatives across all platforms." Read more.
Kenny discussed his new role and the marketing and advertising opportunity ahead.
AdExchanger.com: Why move to The Weather Channel and the sell-side?
DK: Listen, I love brands. I love to create a product. I love convergence. This has a foundation in all of that. To me, it's just a great place to use my creative muscles as well as my analytic muscles because we've got both science and programming here. So it's a very rare, cool opportunity that fits me quite well.
I would say advertisers need new solutions and need media to evolve. They need platforms to work across all screens. And I'd like to continue being a pioneer.
Considering your background in the agency world, can you see bringing agency services in-house to The Weather Channel?
I think we need to keep building out the content side and engaging the audience and making it a deeper relationship. So I'm going to focus on that. Advertisers and their agencies will find ways to work with us to act as our platform. But I don't think we have to disintermediate anybody. I don't think we need growth out of somebody else's backyard.
I'm a believer in agencies. We work well with them and will continue to do so, as opposed to compete with them.
Even though we’re early into your tenure there, what would you say marketers need these days in terms of an advertising opportunity with a partner like Weather Channel?
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Last Thursday, Aol and Bonnier's Parenting Group announced a deal which will bring Parenting.com content to Aol owned and operated sites as well as leverage Aol's salesforce and ad products on behalf of Parenting.com's own site. Read more.
Ned Brody, CRO and President of AOL Advertising, discussed the deal.
Click below or scroll for more:
AdExchanger.com: So, this seems like a syndication deal - at least from Parenting.com's perspective. How has the syndication of digital content changed in the past couple of years?
NB: For us, this is really about an audience aggregation play that provides advertisers a better scale opportunity to buy one of the most interesting audiences in the market, essentially, parents. Now as part of that, when they have content that we think is great, we can run that content on our site and vice‑versa. If anything, I think the comment that you're really looking at from a syndication perspective is that while consumers can search for anything they want, that is a proactive action.
Editorialization, or "curation" to use the trendier word, doesn't require active use of a consumer. So if Aol brings in some strong content from other sites - which is part of the Huffington Post formula - and picked the content for its quality and level of interest, then that's a benefit to my consumer. Early syndication deals were around pushing content out for monetization purposes. For us, the only syndication piece of it is that we enjoy is the opportunity to pull in other content from sites that would be enjoyed by our user base.
But, first and foremost, this is really a content aggregation play focused on advertisers and our tools from a publisher perspective. And, you and I have had the conversation that at AOL we've been spending a lot of effort over the last couple years building out our publisher tool kit. It really started with Advertising.com. We added video through GoViral and 5min. We have added technology from companies like ADTECH where we can both manage [a publisher’s] stack and monetization. When we take over the reserved sales for a company, it leverages our existing sales force in combination with all those optimization pieces. Of course, the last piece I shouldn't leave out is the increased yield. As publishers look to increase their yield, we feel like we have a more robust offering to those publishers through the combination of our technology, in addition to our salesforce.
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Claiming an "average 20% revenue lift for adopted recommendations", Google's DoubleClick Ad Exchange announced this week that it was allowing its ad exchange publishers to set price floors as well as the ability to take advantage of new CPM pricing recommendations. Read the blog post.
DoubleClick Ad Exchange's product management director, Scott Spencer, answered questions about the announcement.
AdExchanger.com: Do AdSense publishers get to use Minimum CPM recommendations? Any plans here? They are a part of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, of course.
SS: Most of the publishers on our Exchange have large, sophisticated sales organizations and are managing inventory across direct and indirect sales channels. So, many of the tools we roll out on Ad Exchange are designed to help them with this process. Minimum CPMs, for example, are a critical tool for managing buyers’ access across the channels, and for allowing publishers to understand how much revenue they might be leaving on the table if their direct sales team wants to sell inventory at a lower rate. Generally, AdSense publishers are dealing with a different set of demands, and the tools we offer them are designed to help meet their specific business needs.
If you're rolling out pricing recommendations, will you be showing the buy-side on DoubleClick Ad Exchange what you're recommending to publishers? It might be an interesting feature, no?
Sharing is good... but over-sharing can be bad. We want to ensure buyers always want to bid as high as possible for every impression. If we give the buyer the minimum CPM, they may try to just outbid it by a penny. Likewise, we don't pass publishers the bids from exchange buyers because then, publishers will set the min CPMs at one penny below those bids. This can increase revenue in the short-term, but buyers would quickly catch on and decrease every subsequent bid until they hit the publisher's real floor. By giving the right amount of information to optimize in the aggregate, we maintain buyers’ incentive to bid their true value and help publishers fairly value their inventory, benefitting both publishers and buyers over the long term.
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Aol and VivaKi announced a new partnership which will look to unearth new formats for online video advertising and will be part of VivaKi's "The Pool" initiative. Read the release.
Erin Clift, SVP of Branded Experiences at Aol, discussed the deal as well as her own role that addresses both marketer and agency constituencies.
AdExchanger.com: Can you talk a little about your multi-faceted role and the goals that are involved? It seems unique.
EC: I've been at AOL for two-and-a-half years and joined the company after seven‑plus years at Google. When I originally came over here, I did a lot of sales development, built teams, put things in place, but now I have two primary roles.
The first is building out our agency development team. The personal goals of that role are to think about the agency as the primary customer of AOL. That's typically not how an ads or sales organization thinks. They really think about the client first.
This allows us to have a specialist team, who not only understands and knows the executives and influencers across the agencies – which are thousands ‑‑ but also really understand economics. The goals are really to accelerate revenue growth that's usually beneficial for both the agency and for AOL, and removing operational barriers to doing business together, which tends to be the challenges for a lot of publishers and agencies. Then, of course, really create AOL experts at scale, and evangelists at scale. So, education and evangelism. We think about the holding company as a separate customer, and then the agencies that roll up into that. So that's the agency role.
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The highly-anticipated announcement by Yahoo! this morning has come and gone - there's still no official word on the Aol, Yahoo! and Microsoft agreement to sell each other's data-driven, non-guaranteed inventory through still-undisclosed methods.
But, Yahoo! did announce that it's going to go beyond its current, video news distribution deal with ABC News and leverage what some say Yahoo! does best and help create branded, web content. Ad-supported content strategy is alive and well - particularly when the word "premium" is involved.
From the release (view it):
"This new venture blends ABC News' global newsgathering operation and unrivaled lineup of trusted anchors and reporters with Yahoo! News' unmatched audience, depth and breadth of content. Beginning today, GoodMorningAmerica.com, launches on Yahoo! along with three new online-first video series hosted by the award-winning, trusted anchors of ABC News."
Part of the benefit of the ABC News link up, which goes way beyond Good Morning America, is that Yahoo! will be aggregating still more "premium", Class 1 inventory - whether its video, graphical display, mobile or another. Yahoo! EVP Ross Levinsohn stressed "premium" content in the press conference with ABC on Monday.
The opportunity to create partnerships with media companies as well as slick online destinations AT SCALE on their behalf is still an overlooked Yahoo! asset. Levinsohn briefly discussed the content management system (CMS) and platforms (LiveSpan for mobile) that ABC will leverage.
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We asked representatives of the publisher side of the ad ecosystem the following question:
"What solutions are still needed for today's premium, digital publisher?"
Below, Jay Wright, Yield Management Group Leader at Cars.com, provides his ideas.
"The barriers from a premium publisher perspective are not really technological constraints. Naturally, sales channel conflict is a huge fear in the culture of a sales team. But even setting aside general fear, there are legitimate questions around price erosion and market liquidity. For most premium publishers, it seems the upside of using an exchange comes down to how much inventory is available for that channel. If 70% of impressions are unsold, there is a tremendous revenue upside that might even surpass the revenue from the direct channel. However, if the situation is reversed, where 80% of impressions or more are sold directly at top rates, then there is a huge risk exposure from direct sales price erosion. Likewise, liquidation could be a challenge if the supply is constrained one month and widely available the next. Regardless, a small test would go a long way to seeing if the perceived barriers had any credibility. Unfortunately, I don't think the questions surrounding price erosion and liquidity can be full tested on a small scale. So, even after testing, putting large volumes of inventory into the supply side exchange can be a bit of a leap of faith."
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We asked representatives of the publisher side of the ad ecosystem the following question:
"What solutions are still needed for today's premium, digital publisher?"
Below, Benjamin Kneen, Interactive Media Manager at WebMD, provides his ideas.
"Plenty! The first thing that comes to mind though is a robust toolset to manage data leakage. Cookies are lifeblood to buy-side ad tech, and the sell side offers almost nothing to control and monitor that process for publishers. A few of the ad technology companies offer some lightweight products to this end, but they are mediocre at best and offer no true controls, just some basic reporting from a sample set of data, which is only so useful, or are designed as an all or nothing blunt instrument. It's a good start, but publishers need more.
Data collection just isn't that simple, and it's not going away. Publishers need a way to stop data collection as needed, and audit whatever they choose to allow - who gets to drop pixels, how many they get to drop, which parties are allowed, if they are allowed to piggyback other pixels, if so, to who, and what the expiration guidelines of those cookies are, etc. Publishers also need help and advice to understand the problem in the first place, so building a consultative client services group around this solution is key - ad tech needs to stop thinking about product development as an arms race with the buy side; publishers and advertisers are partners and they want to stay that way!
So publishers want tools, but what they need is a long term strategy and the knowledge of how to compromise with clients. Publishers won't say 'find a way to stop this', they'll say 'find a way for me to do this safely and responsibly, that accomplishes the client goals, and doesn't create a conflict for my business'. You can only engineer halfway to the solution here, any product will have to come with knowledgeable support that speaks media."
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