Examining The Ad Exchange; Opportunity To View Buying; Brand's Digital Buddy

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

It’s Not An Ad Exchange

In an opinion piece on ClickZ, Adnetik CEO Ed Montes argues that there are no true advertising exchanges in the sense that they mirror information symmetry between buy and sell sides of financial markets, for example. “…One can question the fairness of the [ad] exchanges. Exchanges, to date, provide an information bias in favor of the supply side. (…) So a publisher can easily see transaction data but a buyer cannot (generally speaking). A buyer is permitted the knowledge of its bid data (‘clearing price’) or the price on its winning bids, but is not provided the clearing price on lost bids.” He wants more transparency, more information for both sides. Read more.

Opportunity to View (OTV)

Cadreon founder and current Pretarget CEO Keith Pieper announced that his company is now guaranteeing impression views. In other words, if the user never gets below-the-fold to see those below-the-fold ads, no charge! Read the release. The “Opportunity to View (OTV) measurement” leverages the comScore-AdXpose display ad validation tech within CPM based display campaigns. Here’s another step for ad verification companies which could provide a new buying metric using the swirl of metrics it sees.

Brand’s Digital Buddy

comScore’s Gian Fulgoni sees ads shifting to digital because of hard economic times in a think piece on Ad Age. He points out that consumers aren’t buying the brands they want but are buying a “peer” brand when it’s on sale, or a cheaper product. Where does digital fit it? It can drive awareness and in-store purchase says Fulgoni. Empower the brand.

The Rise Of The Ad Machine

Namely’s Matt Straz postulates on the future of advertising circa 2020 in his MediaPost Online Spin column. “While some level of human-based media sales and strategy will always be necessary, by 2020 the majority of ad deals will be struck silently inside of machines.” Gulp. Read it.

For The Sake Of CPMs

On Digiday, Mike Shields covers the YouTube skippable ads format known as TrueView and its impact on online advertising. He sees Google YouTube’s desire to ratchet up the use of skippable ads as a way “to ensure scarcity, and hopefully high CPMs of course. While YouTube has increasingly become a must buy for big Web advertisers, it still has a ways to go before it can lay claim to the TV dollars that are flowing to broadcast TV sites and Hulu, which typically attract hefty CPMs.” Power to the user as Google continues to disrupt. Read more.

Traffic Acquisition vs. Discovery

Flurry’s Peter Farago digs through the data and several nice looking charts from his company and discovers that the app business in mobile has a new challenge: “With app downloads increasing month-over-month and app usage not only climbing, but also surpassing web usage, we know that consumers are both discovering and using apps more than ever. And while the industry often talks about discovery as a problem, we think the real problem is traffic acquisition. To understand this, we turn to the web.” Ads are to blame! Turn to the web.

But Wait. There’s More!