The ‘The Sell Sider’ Category
"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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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Tom Shields is CEO of Yieldex, a publisher yield optimization company.
Let me be the first to introduce you to the hot new TLA (three-letter acronym) for 2010: RTS. 2009 brought you RTB done by DSPs. On the other side, we've just been introduced to SSPs, so that means they should do - you guessed it - Real-Time Selling!
I am only partly joking here. As I've written before, RTB continues to skew the power in favor of the buyers. A healthy ecosystem requires a balance of power between buyers and sellers. To help restore the balance, publishers need a complementary system - an SSP - and part of what an SSP should provide is real-time selling.
So, what is real-time selling? We define it as the ability for sellers to set floor prices in real time to make sure they're getting full value for their inventory, in the same way buyers can set bids in real time based on available information at the time of the impression request.
One of the major selling points of DSPs is they can incorporate information from many sources - agency and advertiser data, third party providers, and the publishers themselves - and use it to decide how much an impression is worth. Somewhat less obvious is that the worth of the impression is actually just a ceiling on what the buyer is willing to pay, and sophisticated bid management programs often bid much lower in an attempt to get the impressions for the lowest value. This means the publisher may get much less than the buyer would have been willing to pay.
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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 Ad Network Sales at hi5 Networks, Inc., a social media website.
I know the AdMeld Partner Forum in NYC a couple of weeks ago has been mentioned multiple times already, but I wanted to give it some more love anyway. The conference was fantastic, sporting almost all of the top minds in the real-time bidding (RTB) space. The one thing that I didn't like though was the absence of discussion about SSPs (Sell-Side Platforms) for publishers. Later, at the after-party, I made it a point to walk up to each DSP and ask, "What can you do for me!?"
One may wonder, "Why should DSPs even consider building an SSP?" That's easy: they are missing out on 50% of the revenue. Ad exchange models currently charge both the buyer and the seller. Even if DSPs served 100% of all impressions they would only be making 50% of the revenue. Well…. ...unless DSP's use the new technology to find another way to arbitrage CPMs… which of course they would never do. 
This brings me to my next point, RTB doesn't do much good at all (or might even have a negative effect) for publisher CPMs. RTB allows advertisers to buy on an even more effective dCPM (dynamic CPM) than is offered on non-RTB exchanges.
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"The Sell-Sider" is a column written by the sell-side of the digital media community.
Tom Shields is CEO of Yieldex, a publisher yield optimization company.
Google's release of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange 2.0 has introduced Real-Time Bidding (RTB) to a much wider audience, While they were not the first, they are probably the biggest, and their entry is starting to legitimize RTB as more than just a niche.
Neal Mohan's introductory blog post
(see it here) emphasizes the three main principles behind the development of their exchange: simplify the system for buying and selling, deliver better performance, and open up the ecosystem. It's this last point - openness - that I'd like to explore.
Real-time bidding offers some openness for the buyers: they are delivered each impression, with the floor price, URL, and cookie, and have a fixed amount of time to bid. They are then notified if they win and a request is made to deliver the advertisement. What's surprising is that unlike a standard auction, at eBay for example, if they lose, the potential buyer has no idea what the winning bid was. Google gets to keep all that information.
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