The Crowded Buy Side

There’s been a lot of buzz about Terry Kawaja’s keynote at the recent IAB NE event. AdExchanger has posted the presentation and the video, “A few good DSPs” in case you’ve missed it.

The most interesting slide in that deck is the ecosystem map that Terry has worked out. We already knew how bad it is, of course. There are a lot of players in the marketplace. It’s a complex value chain where margins will be inevitably get squeezed. Too many players going for the same pie. Etc.

What’s striking in this map, however, is the imbalance in the number of companies being started on the advertiser side versus publisher side.

So why is this? Why is it that most ad technology companies are being started on the buy side? Is it because the greatest value to be created for advertisers resides in how media is bought and sold, and how precise the targeting is? Surely all these companies can’t all believe that given any 300×250 or 728×90 the client throws at them, they can make sense of it and create value for the brand, simply by adding targeting options and making inventory cheaper to buy?

The main reason is very simple. You can change the actual terms and start talking about DSPs, SSPs and whatnot, but at the core of all this is still good old ad serving. And when it comes to ad serving, the barrier to entry is much, much higher to work with publishers. A provider of buy-side technology can approach any client or agency, ask for a small budget to try out their “buying platform” (whether or not it even exists), and they can make it successful on a small scale with relative ease. The agency can include this new placement as an additional line item in an already long media plan.

If something goes down, it’s really not a big deal. In the case of RTB you simply won’t serve and no one will incur any cost. In the case of direct third-party ad delivery, you can make appropriate arrangements with publishers to take you out of rotation.  Failing is really not that bad. The big guys such as Yahoo! certify you and make you sign SLA agreements but for the most part, it’s not a problem.

Compare this to working with publishers. Even taking into consideration how bad the legacy platforms they run are, convincing a publisher to change first-party ad serving technology is incredibly difficult.  It’s mission-critical stuff. There are a lot of people to train.  You simply cannot go down. If you do, money is being lost, literally. On the technology side there is a huge complexity of pacing and scheduling campaigns given their delivery objectives. As a publisher, you need to deliver on your commitment of volume. Data aggregation is also crucial and is very complex to manage on a large scale (see this post by Mike on Ads for more on this).

On the upside, despite the complexity, working directly with publishers really allows to create value for advertisers. It brings you closer to formats and site layouts, user profiles and data. It brings you closer to participating in the creation of new ad products that advertisers and agencies actually buy. It allows you experiment with them and showcase your value.

With AdGear we took the approach of starting with first-party ad technology, spending the time it took to work out the hard stuff. Fortunately, in this new RTB world first-party technology is also a huge asset for advertisers and agencies as well, since you essentially end up scheduling and pacing campaigns over a huge pool of inventory (albeit with more targeting and filtering).

No matter the number of players in that ecosystem map, chances are that at the end of the ad serving chain, it’s still the good old Atlas, DFP or OAS making the scheduling decisions and stopping delivery once the volume objective has been accomplished.  These legacy platforms are still the backbone of what we consider to be the new value chain.  The good news it that there is an increasing number of companies that are taking a stab at first party ad tech, too.  And that is a good thing for the quality of advertising in the medium.

Stupid RTB Tricks

At BLOOM we’ve been integrating real-time bidding functionality and have been running campaigns through AdGear since November 20o9. We’re plugged in to the DoubleClick AdX 2.0 and although our volume there is relatively small compared to the “traditional” third party delivery, it’s been a lot of fun.

To anyone dealing with the sheer scale enabled by RTB, it ends up being a boundless source of ideas for very questionable practices. This, in turn, raises the issues of privacy and data ownership. There has been a lot of coverage of RTB, and of course AdExchanger has done an amazing job in covering the new generation of ad companies (including us!). But let’s talk about the dark side of RTB.  The Stupid RTB Tricks. Media hacking.

1) Browser history retargeting.  Imagine that you have a two-sided display campaign. On one end, you run on sites or networks bought direct, with huge reach. Everytime you serve an impression, you check user’s browser history (see a demo of the CSS trick here). What you check for are your advertisers’ competitors’ sites.  In the second part of the campaign, you retarget those who have visisted your competitors’ site with a sweet call to action.

2) Über-browser history retargeting. Adding on top of the first trick — create a segment for those who have visited more than one of your competitors’ sites. This might indicate that the person is in a serious shopping mode. Since browser history CSS trick works based on actual URLs and not just top-level domains, you could go really deep inspecting which products on your competitors’ sites were looked at. Targeting this segment through RTB is a no-brainer — bid like you’ve never bid before.

3) Using premium media as audience qualifiers. Buy a direct campaign with a premium publisher that reaches a very valuable audience. Say, WSJ. Run the campaign with frequency cap of 1. Reuse this data to serve to the same exact audience across the RTB universe. Do so for more than one advertiser, compensating the original advertiser whose budget went to WSJ.

Of course, there are many more opportunities of this sort.  And although there is nothing really new here, having the possibility of doing it “on tap” without necessarily having a huge scale in the retargeting segments is definitely new. You don’t need to setup anything special with ad networks and run 10 witnessing tags from 10 of them, don’t need to commit ad budgets for retargeting without knowing what the final reach will be, etc.

I’d love to see other people post more examples of media hacking (both in the good and bad sense of it).

Saving Newspapers?

The best newspapers have always held up a mirror to their communities. Now they can offer a digital place for their readers to congregate and talk. And just as we have seen different models of payment for TV as choice has increased and new providers have become involved, I believe we will see the same with news. We could easily see free access for mass-market content funded from advertising alongside the equivalent of subscription and pay-for-view for material with a niche readership.

I certainly don’t believe that the Internet will mean the death of news. Through innovation and technology, it can endure with newfound profitability and vitality. Video didn’t kill the radio star. It created a whole new additional industry.

Eric Schmidt: How Google Can Help Newspapers - WSJ.com

It may very will be that new ways of consuming online content will bring a new life to advertising. One of the biggest problems with online is lack of context — but consuming a magazine on a digital tablet of sorts may bring context, reduce content ADD, and even bring some richness to formats (ex. size).

Ad Ops Complexity

“The new IAB audit will go a long way to standardize the industry. An overwhelming amount of impressions are audited throughout the web, and verification systems will need to help the ecosystem and not hurt the process. According to a survey Dan initiated, “Ad Ops is 50% more complex than it was 3 years ago”. Fragmentation is out of control right now because of the different sites and structure in the marketplace. While innovation and growth are not slowing down, the largest concern for media companies is “Inventory and Yield Management”. A close second is “Billing Discrepancies.””

“Ad Ops is 50% more complex than it was 3 years ago”- IAB Ad Operations Summit | Operative Blog

What an exciting year 2010 will be. Ad exchanges, data decoupled from media context, real time bidding… Publishers trying to figure out what to do with ad networks… Ad networks trying to figure out what it is that they’ll be selling… Agencies trying to make sense of data they’re collecting… And that’s all before even thinking about formats and experiences that need to be delivered to brands.

Advertising has never been this complex.

RightMedia rebranded as Premium

Yahoo Rebrands Its Right Media Exchange as Premium

Move Hopes to Capitalize on Agency Dollars Entering Exchanges, Shed Bad Rap of Ad Networks

Digital: Yahoo Rebrands Its Right Media Exchange as Premium - Advertising Age - Digital

I’ve been trying to get in touch with someone there for months. You can’t leave a phone message. Emails go unanswered. Forms on web site as well. Emailing the top guy through LinkedIn didn’t help either.

Sorry Yahoo, but as far as I’m concerned, rebranding RightMedia as Premium will not help you at this pace.

Mobile ads - wait until when?

“What’s more, targeting ads to mobile phone users is still in its infancy. The carriers sit on a trove of user information and location data that is largely unavailable to marketers. Brightkite hopes to change that by showing ads to users based on their physical location. In a campaign launching this month, it’s combining location and prior user behavior with augmented reality to show users on-screen product offers from nearby retail outlets.”

Mobile Ads: Wait Until Next Year

Agreed.

One of the problems with display advertising is the lack of context data. Unlike with traditional media, where a billboard is always a billboard and is seen by someone in the car while in traffic, online ads have no context attached to them.

In mobile, at least there is (in theory) location info. But because of privacy issues I’m not sure how that can scale. So what’s left for mobile advertising, then? Brand ads, 50 pixels at a time?

Does advertising decay exist?

“Though we’ve been doing advertising effectiveness analysis for over a year now, we’re continually learning new things about online advertising. The newest learning? The time-honored concept of “advertising decay” is a myth.”

The Myth of Advertising Decay

A really interesting case study from Compete for Banana Republic, and incidentally, for intrusive big-ass ad formats on major media properties such as NYT.com

Motorola Droid on cnn.com

This is the homepage of cnn.com right now. I’m sorry, social media douchebags, but a twitter account does not have the same advertising impact. But that’s besides the point. Cool ad unit.

The not-so secret media buying revolution

• There is a vast shortage of opportunities to expose advertising messages to actual potential customers
• Early participants in new online display marketplaces are finding steep discounts on highly targeted audiences — but this is bound to change
• Going forward, premium publishers will get ultra-high eCPMs on highly targeted impressions of quantifiably valuable audiences”

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The secret media-buying revolution - iMediaConnection.com

Not sure how this is “secret” but it’s definitely true. This it the most exciting time for ad technologies since a long time. Happy to be part of it.

The roster shops

“The roster shops, especially Firstborn and Big Spaceship, have a heritage in digital production work and have often partnered with lead agencies to execute highly technical creative ideas. Recently, these small independent operations have been winning increasingly more direct-to-client work. Most recently, Firstborn won direct-to-client digital responsibilities for PepsiCo’s Sobe.”

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Wrigley Drops Tribal DDB, Digitas and Agency.com for Digital - Agency News - Advertising Age

Firstborn and Big Spaceship are the best agency names ever