Frank Weishaupt is VP North American Marketplaces at Yahoo!.

One reason I love this business is that it’s always evolving. Change is essential to success in online advertising…especially when it comes to ad exchanges.

As the needs of ad networks, publishers, agencies and advertisers continue to change, exchanges have had to stay ahead of every impression and develop marketing solutions that can help these players improve and differentiate their businesses.

We know these players are already doing part of the work on their own – gathering the data and insights necessary to manage yield and return on ad spend. But it’s not enough. Exchanges provide a larger marketplace that’s needed to efficiently leverage that data and quickly turn it into revenue. There is no better place to do that than in an open exchange ecosystem. Here’s why:

• An open exchange helps participants in the digital advertising ecosystem conduct business with each other in a seamless fashion.
• An open exchange delivers marketers the greatest number of options in how they define and reach their relevant audiences.
• An open exchange helps solve supply fragmentation by offering a complete, multi-level solution for servicing marketers’ needs. A closed network cannot accomplish this.

Even with all these benefits, everyone at Right Media and Yahoo! understands that openness alone is still not enough to meet the varied and ever-changing needs of marketers. We’re constantly thinking about how we can maintain our position as the largest exchange platform and stay true to the values that have made us a success: running a transparent, fair, open and efficient ad platform.

Our own evolution has led us to focus much more on being a premium supply and demand platform. We’re already supporting leading digital advertising companies, direct advertisers, data providers and technology innovators and we are working hard to educate these companies about the huge, efficient opportunity afforded by exchanges. Providing seamless access to premium supply is critical for demand-side partners who need to protect their brands.

We’re also working to enable partners to leverage value-added data and insights across the exchange and to more easily integrate our platform with other exchanges with unique hosted supply and/or demand. This will promote the transparent flow of supply and demand across multiple platforms. And we are innovating. I’m most excited about our real-time bidding capability, which is currently in beta with top supply and demand partners. Our real-time bidding capability will obviously benefit the smaller exchanges by helping them increase supply or demand in their respective marketplaces to gain scale, but we are being sensitive to the business objectives of those constituents who want access to real-time bidding. We want to ensure we are empowering unique and differentiated offerings and not just creating increased fragmentation.

Marketers take note: We get it. Budgets are precious and the market is increasingly fragmented. We know you work with multiple exchanges and we look forward to working with them and integrating with them for our partners. Hopefully, they will follow our lead and embrace openness because the industry will be best served by transparency and liquidity.