The ‘Publishers’ Category
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.
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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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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, Vivek Shah, CEO of Ziff Davis, provides his ideas.
"Publishers need to recognize that their audience data, when properly protected, mined and applied, can translate into a meaningful business.
First, publishers need to be sure that no one is skimming their data and this requires a deep and regular examination of every pixel on every page of every site. You’d be surprised how often seemingly harmless widgets collect all kinds of audience data that are used by third parties, including competitors, to inform ad targeting. The marketplace will continue to extract data without explicit permission until publishers stand up to this common and unsavory practice.
Second, you need to invest in technology that can sort through terabytes of data to find true insights into a person’s intent. Look for repeated actions and signals that truly indicate an interest or likelihood to purchase, not just surface “behaviors.”
Finally, you need to attach large pools of ad inventory – your own as well as from partners – to your data assets so that you can offer targeted advertising at scale. Reach and frequency around high-quality data is essential to making an impact with marketers. In the end, premium publishers should view ad technology as an opportunity, not the threat it is often perceived to be."
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Buy-side ad technology firms have been well-financed by the venture capital industry while the sell-side has been less so. AdExchanger.com wondered what opportunities remain for solutions providers looking to serve the premium publisher.
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, Walker Jacobs, EVP of Turner/SI Digital Ad Sales provides his ideas.
"I think there are probably a number of things. But one thing that I've been wishing for, for several years, and that I've brought up to a couple of the research companies – and has been greeted with very little enthusiasm - is we need a syndicated research company or a panel‑based research company, whether it's Nielsen or comScore or a new entrant to the marketplace, who will start classifying types of inventory.
What I mean by that is when you're looking at a page on the web, is that page user‑generated content, email, an instant messenger application, professionally‑produced video content? Or is it something else?
When a buyer pulls a ranker they can start to see what the ad networks consist of, and what the portals consist of and what the exchanges consist of. They can start pulling different types of rankers for different types of placements. It's similar to the buy side’s tools that they've been using around ad verification and are meant to protect brands – such as DoubleVerify, AdSafe Media or those types of companies.
So, it's seems like we're missing a step in‑between. On the sell side of the premium publisher, it's bizarre that the quality content that we're producing is sometimes lumped together with [other content] when what we're producing is fundamentally different. One's not better or worse, it's just different. I wish somebody would create tools for the sell-side that would help us create transparency around that value creation."
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Gannett announced last week it would expand their local advertising partnership with Yahoo! to all 19 of Gannett's broadcasting division markets by February 2012. Read the release.
Anthony Diaz, VP of Sales and Strategy for Gannett Broadcasting, discussed the announcement and Gannett's local, digital ad strategy with AdExchanger.com.
AdExchanger.com: What are some of the keys at Gannett for a successful, local digital ad strategy?
AD: Our approach has been to, first, fully understand that customer situation and their need. And then, where I think a media outlet like Gannett Broadcasting is unique is that we try and create an idea that solves the problem. We're able to leverage the strong brands we have in our markets to execute these ideas. We utilize broadcast television, dynamic ways to use digital, whether it's our own sites, mobile or opportunities within video.
And then, to bring it full circle to this expansion that we're announcing with Yahoo!, as we understand and deliver audience. Yahoo! gives us the layer of helping those advertisers reach their audiences at the right times, in the most relevant of situations when they're closer to that buying cycle and they're closer to the moment to where they can take action on the ad.
How important is owning tech to create an effective, local, digital ad strategy?
I think it's a mix. I think organizations like ours are always trying to figure out, how can we best serve our customers in our local marketplaces. And I think the approach is going to be different. You back into what makes sense - whether it's to organically build in-house or to enter into a partnership like the one that we've done over the past year with Yahoo. There's really no one answer to it.
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Today, as part of its Universal Audience Platform (UAP), NBC Universal announced the launch of its private exchange for digital, display media.
From the release: "Powered by technology from Admeld, the UAP’s private exchange enables NBC Universal to monetize their ad inventory in a controlled, Real Time Bidding (RTB) environment." Read the release.
Peter Naylor is EVP, Digital Media Sales at NBC Universal. He discussed today's announcement.
AdExchanger.com: What was the tipping point for creating a private exchange strategy?
PN: In January 2009 we launched our first campaign with Vivaki AOD in the first version of the DoubleClick ad exchange. At that point we saw a need for a specialized sales and support team to work with emerging programmatic buying teams. In February 2010 we were given the green light to invest in building the UAP team. We did this not only to evolve with our agency partners but also to take back control of our inventory from the ad networks who were selling against our media brands.
With your Universal Audience Platform (UAP), and looking at the opportunity ahead, are you being proactive or is their significant opportunity today in audience buying for NBCU?
We're capturing demand today and positioning ourselves for the future. Some agencies have clearly invested in people and technology that will help lower the cost of buying digital media. That's a serious pain point for agencies right now. Buying digital is considerably more expensive than buying TV. So we're seeing agencies move more budget into buying audiences at scale through efficient means, in terms of process and technology. These agencies are spending incremental media dollars with us today as a direct result of our private exchange. And by incremental I mean the spending is complimentary (rather than cannibalistic) to the premium programs that drive our business. Establishing programmatic buying relationships with our agency partners is an important step in helping them efficiently scale their businesses in the face of growing digital budgets.
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