Floor Pricing For 'Supply Partners'; Tablets Aren't Mobile

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Floor Pricing Fixer Upper

On its blog, Yahoo!’s Right Media (RMX) announced enhanced floor pricing capabilities for “supply partners” seeking to sell display advertising through the Exchange. The use of “supply partners” instead of “publishers” is telling. Other than Yahoo!, it would seem ad networks use RMX on the supply-side versus any direct-to-publisher relationships. Perhaps, one of the only publisher relationships that exists is Aol which spilled some inventory into RMX as part of the nearly forgotten Aol-Yahoo-Microsoft “kumbaya” in 2011. Read RMX blog. Yahoo’s inventory remains the sole, “tasty” inventory on Right Media for many demand-side buyers.

Tablets Aren’t Mobile

The impact of Google’s new Enhanced Campaigns rollout (blog post) could be a big decline in granular campaign planning as mobile and desktop-based campaigns are squished together, agencies warned. In a position piece, Adobe’s Bill Mungoven calls out how Google will henceforth lump tablet devices with PCs — not with smartphones. “Google has made a clear statement to its advertisers: tablets aren’t mobile. But they’ve taken it a step further and effectively said that tablets are desktops.” More.

Take Me To Your Leader

The portrait drawn of AOL CEO Tim Armstrong by AdAge’s Jason Del Rey is of a breathless corporate leader who is either the most hands-on, creative spirit or a maddening micro-manager. Still, Wall Street is impressed in spite of it all. “It’s really easy to throw stones around the lack of traffic growth or the monetization around the ad inventory or the fact that Patch still isn’t profitable,” said Heath Terry, a Goldman Sachs analyst. “But if you had bet anyone out there when Tim took over that AOL would be where it is now, there wouldn’t have been a lot of takers.” Read more.

Programmatic’s Promise

Now, now, don’t be ashamed — you’re not sure if the term “programmatic” is synonymous with “real-time bidding.” (Actually, you can be a little ashamed, since you should have read this piece defining programmatic and this one on RTB, but we’ll let it pass this time.) In a Digiday post entitled “Programmatic Isn’t Just RTB,” Walter Knapp, EVP at Federated Media, COO of its Lijit Networks unit, writes, that programmatic’s advances are “far more powerful than simply targeting and buying audiences at scale” through RTB. The promise is in “restoring the balance between publishers and advertisers,” he says. “We reclaim this balance by leveraging programmatic technology to understand the motivations of a reader and then place a message at an appropriate time and creatively in the right channel at a value attractive to both the marketer and the publisher.” Read the rest.

Rubicon: No Sell-Out

With an IPO in mind, Rubicon Project CEO and founder Frank Addante tells Mediapost’s Joe Mandese that the company’s strong balance sheet means that no matter what happens, it’s going to be more of an acquirer, not a takeover play. It’s brought in some new hires, including Mediaplex Founder & CEO Greg Raifman in as president and founding Overture CFO Todd Tappin in as COO & CFO, and moved others out in attempt to further expand the company’s demand-side services. “We never referred to ourselves as a supply side platform,” he says, they don’t want to be seen as a DSP either. “A DSP is there to service the advertiser and help them optimize their campaigns… Our strategy is to bring the buyer and the seller together.” Read more.

Location, Location, Location

In the early days of mobile advertising, the notion that geo-location was the most likely way to drive revenue was all anyone could talk about. But then, the realization was that brand marketers don’t want to wait for a person to approach a store’s vicinity. So targeters looked for more PC-style, cookie-like approaches to connecting consumers with ads. Meanwhile, geo-targeting specialists like Verve Mobile are pushing back against that notion, suggesting that mobile campaigns leveraging location-based campaigns outperformed non-location ones by a factor of two times, reports Mobile Marketer’s Chantal Tode. “The most surprising finding was how poorly exchange-based inventory performed – we knew much of the location data in exchanges was specious but didn’t realize that the majority of it was inaccurate,” said Verve CEO Tom MacIsaac. Read more.

Big In Japan

AdTruth, which competes with BlueCava and Tapad among others, signed with Yahoo Japan on cross-device audience recognition. The companies say in a statement, “Just in the last two years, Yahoo! JAPAN’s audience recognition challenge has grown exponentially and will continue to do so as new devices emerge.” For all the noise about Device ID in recent years, the space feels quiet going into 2013. Press release.

German Tech

European ad tech marches to the beat of a different drum, as Deutsche Telekom demonstrates by acquiring retargeter xplosion interactive for its media selling unit. ExchangeWire says, “This typically follows the trend of German Sales Houses investing and buying local advertising technology players. A number of large German Sales Houses own – or are heavily invested in – localised ad server, SSP and ad tech solutions.” More.

Rankings

Hearts were aflutter yesterday in ad tech land as Forbes released its 100 fastest growing, private companies list and a selection of ad tech firms were highly ranked. See it now. Rocket Fuel and OpenX finished in the top 10 while several other ad tech firms were listed in the top 100. Forbes discusses its ranking methodology thusly, “The final assessment is based on growth (both in sales and hiring), quality of management team and investors, margins, market size and key partnerships.”

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