The ‘The Sell Sider’ Category
"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Today's column is written by Pam Horan, President of the Online Publishers Association, a not-for-profit trade organization that represents online publishers
In the Chinese zodiac, 2012 is the Year of the Dragon, a fitting animal characterized by being driven, unafraid of challenges and willing to take risks. This year, akin to the ancient tradition, will offer many opportunities for marketers to make a strong brand impact online, based on strategically capitalizing on industry advancements that will enhance their ability to tell a brand's story and make meaningful connections while more effectively measuring their results.
For some marketers, 2011 was the year of racing to gather the most Facebook Fans or "Likes." However, as the year came to a close, the savvy marketer is realizing that the value of the "Like" is illusive and unless they can measure the true value, investing in these activities may not be the best way to drive their branding goals in 2012.
For the marketer focused on making a meaningful brand impact this year, there are a few critical advertising elements that should be top of mind as they work to finalize their campaigns.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Tyler Fitch is Director of Yield Management at Mindjolt, an online games company.
The following has been building up for months after seeing article after article of DSP execs saying that publishers are wrong and should open up their all their inventory to RTB while there’s little public pushback from the sell-side community. It’s like the Oil Industry telling the public that they should all go out and buy a brand new Hummer.
It’s 100% in the DSP’s best interest for Publishers to open up their entire inventory to RTB and might not be in best interest of the publisher. Now I am not saying not to use exchanges, I am actually a huge advocate of them. RTB allows the publisher to show the right ad at the right time but RTB also allows us not to be rewarded for showing relevant ads. Publishers need to know how RTB can help or hurt their revenue streams.
As a sell-side operations executive, the main problems I have with RTB are as follows:
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Michael Zimbalist is VP, Research & Development Operations for the New York Times Co. He also co-founded the Online Publishers Association (OPA) and serves as a member of its executive committee.
In the years since Terry Kawaja first published his famous chart illustrating the diversity of companies within the online display advertising ecosystem, I have witnessed literally dozens online publishers, large and small, come to grips with the way that data flows within this complex marketplace. The process that publishers go through closely resembles a modified version of the Five Stages of Grief that was first described by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. It goes something like this:
Stage One: Denial
The publisher is alerted to the fact that (in all likelihood) a wide variety of different companies – so called “third parties” - are planting pixels or dropping cookies throughout the publisher’s website.
The publisher’s reaction is bewilderment, expressed as denial: “No way. Uh-uh. Not on my site. This can’t possibly be happening.”
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Ali C. Mirian is VP, Product and Technology, at IAC Advertising.
It was the greatest cheddar cheese I have ever tasted. Sweet, yet subtly sharp, and utterly mouth-watering.
Jasper Hill Farm in Greensboro, Vermont has one goal - to produce, age and distribute artisanal cheese of the highest quality. Mateo and Andy Kehler bought Jasper Hill Farm in 1998 and spent the next five years trying to figure out how they can build a business model for sustainable agricultural development. They tried farmstead beer, no luck. Took on tofu from home grown soy beans. Strike two. Then in 2002, they bought 15 heifers, and set out to create a farmstead cheese company with a twist. Not only will it create delicious cheese from its own milk, it will build large-scale caves to age cheese for other local makers in their own caves. They will even handle the distribution of the cheeses on top of their existing palettes and ship them off together in bulk. Small cheese makers don't have to worry about costly shipping charges and don't need to build a cave. They can simply do what they do best: make great cheese.
To cheese makers, aggregation is a means to higher prices for smaller suppliers. To publishers, aggregation means something else entirely. For centuries, ad networks - the aggregators of our time - have been accomplices in the drive to bring prices down in order to provide buyers a cheaper alternative. As a result though, advertisers are losing trust in the ad networks that cannot provide both disclosure and quality assurance on their inventory pool, which has further decreased the prices ad networks can garner. Ad networks succeeded by acquiring inventory cheaply, and selling it less cheaply, while vigilantly managing the spread. But by virtue of the very efficiencies they've created (thanks, we appreciate it), ad networks unwittingly forced themselves to remodel. Now that agencies have joined the aggregation game in the form of the Agency Trading Desk (ATD), there is a whole new breed of next-gen intermediaries who are asking publishers to trade one middleman for another, while promising new value creation.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Tom Chavez is Founder and CEO of Krux Digital, an advertising technology company.
According to recent analysis (PDF) presented by Tolman Geffs of JEGI, in 2011, roughly 30% of the ~$10 billion in display advertising spend will be via audience-based buying, representing an astonishing 38% CAGR for this segment of the market. This trend, coupled with the advent of real-time media sales channels, introduces huge opportunity and equally huge risk for publishers.
Responding to this trend is an imperative for publishers. In preparing for digital media’s data-driven future, publishers must protect audience assets, adopt new techniques to address consumer privacy concerns, and lay the groundwork for making responsible use of consumers’ digital signatures. Dirty, ill-gotten data is our industry’s blood diamonds, and no one wants to be caught buying, selling, or moving it. Certainly, protecting data and consumer privacy come first, which is why those issues have been at the center of recent press coverage and industry dialogue. But perhaps it’s sensible for us to at least begin to explore the challenges of audience monetization at scale.
The good news is that growing demand for consumer targeting offers publishers new ways both to enhance the value of existing media assets and to create entirely new revenue streams from data. The bad news is that buyers currently have the technological advantage, and middlemen are offering an increasing number of ways to identify audience segments and secure targeted media placements that bypass publishers entirely.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Tyler Fitch is Director of Yield Management at Mindjolt, an online games company.
First, a disclaimer from me: In order to effectively optimize inventory, a publisher must have 100% transparency of their own inventory by page, country, and frequency. Too many publishers have no idea what the value of their inventory is and/or what people are paying for each impression. Setting floors too high or too low can cause catastrophic losses in revenue. End disclaimer.
This article came to me last week when I was speaking with a friend who recently took over at a very large publisher to remain nameless. He asked me for a few pointers on how he could increase the CPM’s on his site. Willing to help out a friend, I agreed and started taking a look around to see what ads he was serving.
They were the same exact remnant ads I was showing on my own sites! When I asked him what his average US CPM was, they were 3x lower than what I was getting paid to show the exact same DoubleClick ad. How could this happen? The second price auction…
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Rajeev Goel is CEO of PubMatic, a publisher yield optimization company.
"Data leakage" sounds nasty.
The term has been used to describe what happens when 3rd parties drop pixels on publishers’ websites and gain valuable knowledge about the publisher’s audience – often without the publisher knowing. However, “leakage” is also probably not the best way to describe this phenomenon. Leakage insinuates that data is just somehow slipping away from the publisher. That isn’t what is happening.
A more accurate depiction is that 3rd party companies are plucking bits of the publisher’s data while the publisher’s back is turned. Every publisher has a garden of data that they have cultivated, but many don’t know how to harvest it or even know the value of all of the different data types in their garden. A few very smart companies realized the value of the publisher’s data garden and started inviting themselves over to pluck some data here and there to add to the media they’re selling independently of the publisher.
Well, that method turned out to be quite profitable for those demand-side experts and the practice increased and similar companies proliferated. Now many publishers are turning around and seeing that their garden has a lot of footprints from other companies in it, and they’re not happy about it.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Rajeev Goel is CEO of PubMatic, a publisher yield optimization company.
With the development of so many sophisticated technical solutions to help online publishers minimize the risk of running malware and ads delivered to the wrong person at the wrong time in the wrong place, it is hard to believe that we still see the unwanted and often ugly teeth whitening and belly fat ads on top 100 websites.
The challenges that publishers face when trying to protect their brand from unwanted ads, malware, channel conflict and other issues that affect their ad revenue and user experience aren’t going away any time soon. In many cases, they are even growing. However, publishers can better protect themselves by having a good understanding of “bad ad” trends and what are the best solutions to prevent them.
You may remember not too long ago malware made headlines because it moved away from smaller, less-known sites and hit the mainstream – even the New York Times was affected by it. How does it happen? It varies. In the case of the New York Times, malware slipped through their direct sales force when an advertiser pretended to be someone they weren’t. Malware typically hits publishers the hardest at the beginning of the quarter – that’s when media budgets are the weakest and malware perpetrators can buy inventory from publishers at the lowest possible rate.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Ben Barokas is Chief Revenue Officer of AdMeld, a publisher yield optimization company.
The Publisher vs. Ad Network thread is among the industry's oldest and most provocative. There's been a requisite panel about it at nearly every conference over the past few years, and just when the debate seems to simmer down, another flare-up puts it back on everyone's radar. Technology is bringing change, but strategy and policy is a big part of the solution. Here are a few suggestions to help publishers navigate these waters:
- Develop an inventory management strategy and socialize it across your entire organization.
Practices like selling the same inventory simultaneously on multiple exchanges are open invitations to arbitrageurs and can be deadly to your bottom line without the proper approach and analytics.
- The world has enough "blind" inventory. The value of inventory without provenance or context is essentially zero, and networks won't buy it. If you choose to sell blind on an exchange, maintain pricing discipline by setting floors across categories and audiences.
- Demand transparency. Ask your networks for an advertiser list for what they're running right now, and if you're using RTB, ask your technology partner. Not enough publishers do this, and it fosters more business and better relationships.
- Stop the reselling. Advise your networks that if they don't have the demand, it is NOT ok to source demand from other networks, especially via the exchanges. This is your best route to eliminating low-quality creative and malware.
I'd be remiss if I didn't say it: yield optimizers have gone a long way towards smoothing these relationships and simplifying transactions. Many of the publishers still grappling with these issues would benefit from engaging one. As the landscape becomes more complex, it pays to have a partner that can apportion your inventory correctly and has the relationships and technical capabilities to aggressively enforce your business rules.
Follow AdMeld (@admeld) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Alanna Clark is Director of Business Development at AdMeld, a publisher yield optimization company.
Three-day weekends, holiday seasons, a plethora of Q1 inventory. These are all normal signals and events throughout the course of our year but also triggers for more unseemly activities, namely malvertising.
The digital advertising space has always had its share of bad actors. But as the ecosystem has grown in size and complexity, so has the cunning of those who use it to spread malware. Malware puts consumers in danger, wastes the industry's time, and sucks billions from the world economy. Until recently, speaking openly about these issues was taboo—especially for those companies that didn't want to risk being branded as 'malware infested.' This kind of attitude has led to the perpetuation of two major malware myths:
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