Right Media Sale Rumors; Modeling Risk; RTB'd Expandables Come To AppNexus, Microsoft Inventory

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RMX “For Sale” Rumor

On All Things D, Kara Swisher’s sources are telling her a sale of Right Media Exchange may be imminent. Swisher writes, “The most ideal plan, said sources, would be to sell Yahoo’s whole advertising technology ‘stack,’ including the Right Media Exchange, a marketplace for advertisers, publishers and ad networks to trade online ads. Yahoo bought it for $700 million in 2007.” Read more. Swisher says Apt is in the mix, too.

This “RMX sale” rumor has been out there for a couple of years now in various forms (guilty as charged!) as innovation and investment have been stifled and executives have exited the exchange. From here, surely Microsoft is waiting in the wings as its initiatives around Microsoft Advertising Exchange or brand advertising display would be something the company would love to expand through the capture of Yahoo!’s owned & operated inventory – non-guaranteed, Class I, II, whatever. It’s like Microsoft getting its Bing search engine on Yahoo! all over again. What Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may need is a calculation or two on how this acquisition will improve his company’s market share in display – and digital ads – and its bottom line now and in the future. Of course, the acquisition of RMX doesn’t necessarily get Microsoft Yahoo!’s display media, yet any deal would most likely include that assurance along with the fact Microsoft-Aol-Yahoo are already in bed together through their announced partnership last December. Post-RMX/Apt, Yahoo! would seem to turn into more of a data-driven media company hurtling into the branded content world of the future. The selection of former Travel Ad Network CEO Brian Silver earlier this year to lead the exchange could be a move to have a C-level executive in place in case the company is spun-out or sold.

Audience Metrics

On AdMonsters, Tribal Fusion’s Doug Conley brings formulas to the discussion around audience buying and presents what he calls “audience efficiency.” He describes the metric: “We can visualise audience efficiency as a tradeoff between how well an audience segment fits a client’s target audience (lift) and the reach. Mathematically, there is no possible selection of audiences that provides the same lift for a given reach or vice versa.” Conley provides examples of “AE” in action, too. Read it.

Modeling For Safe-ty

Sridhar Ramaswamy, who is svp of Engineering at Google, says on his company’s “official” blog that Google is busy implementing to make ads “safe” for users. Modeling is a part of it explains Ramaswamy as he lists recent updates: “New ‘risk model’ to detect violations: Our computer scanning depends on detailed risk models to determine whether a particular ad may violate our policies, and we recently upgraded our engineering system with a new ‘risk model’ that is even more precise in detecting advertisers who violate our policies.” Read more.

Biddable Ubiquity

AppNexus product maven Ari Paparo gets a hold of the login to the AppNexus blog and runs wild with a discussion about his company’s efforts to bring rich media to its real-time ad platform: expandables are now available via real-time bidding which includes Microsoft inventory. Paparo also looks ahead to home-page-takeover type units, “While we were having so much fun building rich media capabilities, we decided to support interstitial ads as well. These high value ad placements cover the content on the page or show a full-page ad between page views. AppNexus customers can now easily deploy interstitials on their own sites or partner sites. For now, RTB capabilities are limited.” Read more. Everything is becoming biddable. Like that coffee you’re drinking… I’ll give you a nickel for a sip. Too late. I just sipped mine for free. Psyche!

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