Rupert Murdoch must have have deep pockets. Very deep pockets. Today is the first day ole Rupe gets to test out his theory that, yes, people are prepared to part with their money for news content. He’s abandoned the free model and gone down the already failed route of charging for a commodity. He’s looked at the figures and rightly ascertained that the Times’ online content, in its present form, cannot financially support its dying offline business. Maybe the paywall will save the newspaper industry. But the reality is it won’t.
» Dataxu released its market research newsletter, MarketPulse, this week. The main thrust of the research focused on campaign performance and the key drivers for success. Carried out over a thirty day period and across impressions for 19 campaigns for leading advertisers, the research returned some interesting results. It looked at three specific attributes: audience, context and creative. All three performed well, but the creative attributes correlated most highly with conversions for 48% of the campaigns.
Glam announced yesterday that it intends to enter the ad server market. Glam Adapt is being touted by the company as the Ad Server 3.0 – moving display advertising beyond the click and measuring on engagement. They’d like the industry to see it as the brand advertiser’s ad server. Hmmm. What are the features? Well the first feature of the new Glam Adapt is the ability to buy audience at scale. Remember the ad net has over 160 global users in its network – and has an advertising-friendly female audience. Glam Adapt has a number of multi-targeting features, including behavioural, contextual, geo, retail data and cookie-based targeting. The new platform will have deeper audience insights, offering advertisers more tools to turn audience data into actionable insights.
Rightmedia Exchange has announced that Global Digital Markets has joined its exchange. Based in London, the performance-based agency aims to maximise the performance of online campaigns for big brands and marketers.
London, Date: 3rd June 2009
Right Media (www.rightmedia.com), a Yahoo! company and creator of the Right Media Exchange, this week announces that recently launched Global Digital Markets will be using the Exchange at the core of its direct response trading business.
Global Digital Markets (www.globaldigitalmarkets.com) offers an impartial and transparent trading solution to advertisers and agencies and will use the Exchange to help them drive more effective performance based online advertising campaigns.
John Were, Operations Director at Global Digital Markets, comments: “We provide our clients with a viable and attractive alternative to other third party options, offering, as we do, all targeting and behavioural marketing possibilities. We joined the Right Media Exchange because of its breadth and depth and the fact it offers us instant scalability and roll out potential for our clients’ campaigns.”
“A key difficulty surrounding online campaigns has always been one of reach. While it has been possible to find pockets of online media that perform it has often been difficult to scale – the online advertising exchanges help overcome this.”
“The Exchange also enables us to source new international partners and inventory easily, helping overcome many of the barriers often associated with researching, identifying and buying overseas advertising space.”
Global Digital Markets represents one of a growing number of emerging businesses that are making the Right Media Exchange and technology central to their operations.
Denise Colella, VP International at Right Media, said: “Today’s media buying environment, driven by technology, is rapidly changing. Platforms are becoming increasingly important to delivering measurable and accountable performance campaigns. The wealth of companies moving on to the Exchange and offering it as a core part of their business is testament to this.”
Pubmatic today announced a partnership with Improve Digital to become the provider of their ad optimisation product to publishers in the European market. It is in many ways a good fit for both companies, as Pubmatic and Improve Digital work closely with publishers and ad networks to optimise online ad inventory. Improve Digital already offer their CMX to large scale publishers, and will be in a strong position to promote Pubmatic’s optimization tool in Europe.
May 6th, Palo Alto – US
PubMatic today officially announced a strategic partnership with Improve Digital to become the leading provider of ad revenue optimisation technology for premium quality publishers and ad networks in Europe. Improve Digital will exclusively offer, implement and service the solution in all European markets. Although the collaboration was agreed earlier this year, it was officially announced following ad:tech in San Francisco. The focus lies with premium quality publishers and ad networks and Improve Digital is putting proof under that statement by building out local account management and service teams in Europe.
Improve Digital has offices with local account management and support in London and Amsterdam and is opening offices in Germany, France and Spain in the coming months. “Europe is a key focus market for us and we want to be sure that we offer the best possible combination of advanced optimisation technology along with local product knowledge, account management and support. Improve Digital has the right connections and background to offer the best in class solution and service to publishers and ad networks.” said Rajeev Goel, CEO and Co-Founder of PubMatic.
Optimizing publisher revenue from ad networks through an automated optimisation platform is relatively new to Europe, but a common practice in the U.S. San Francisco-based technology company PubMatic has been the leader in this area since it launched 3 years ago. PubMatic’s patent-pending algorithms ensure that online publishers generate the most money from their advertising space by predicting and deciding in real-time the ad network that can best monetise each impression. As exclusive European partner, Improve Digital complements the technology with additional services and products. Besides a huge reduction in operational costs, increased control and transparent earnings, this solution results in an eCPM increase of 30-300%.
Janneke Niessen, Co-Founder and COO Improve Digital; “Our solutions allow media owners to increase their revenues and reduce their costs in times of tough market conditions. By matching the right view with the right ad, it becomes beneficial for everyone involved. We are very excited to bring the most advanced real-time technology available in this field to Europe”
The exchange model rumbles along gathering momentum with each passing week. The front runners of the new model are gaining traction in the market. Big brand advertisers now demand a better return on their marketing spend. It is for this reason that the CPA model is in vogue with all marketers and advertisers. Exchanges offer value and accountability. The buyer side is exciting by the prospect.
But some large publishers are still not totally convinced. They want a better price for their inventory, and they still believe remnant exchanges offer little value. With the help of yield optimising tools, from the likes of Admeld, Yieldex, and Rubicon Project, publishers are taking more control of their inventory and the price being paid.
One company looking to help big publishers – those generating upwards of 400 million page impressions per month – maximise the value of their inventory is Amsterdam-based Improve Digital. Their CMX (Controlled Media Exchange) platform leans heavily on the exchange model, but is only open to invited buyers. Publishers put unsold advertising space onto the CMX platform, allowing invited advertisers, marketers and agencies to bid for this inventory.
It might fly in the face of the open exchange model, but there is genuine concern among publishers about the “cannibalisation” of their inventory. Why should an advertiser pay £40 CPM for a premium spot when they can pick up non-guaranteed inventory on the same site for a fraction of the cost from an ad network or ad exchange? The publisher does afterall supply the audience for the media buyer.
By having a closed exchange, publishers can demand a floor price for their inventory and invite the advertisers and media agencies they want on their platform.
For the buyer, CMX allows access to secure and, more importantly, premium inventory. This should allow the CMX platform to become part of the bigger exchange eco system. It might even actually go some way to addressing the availability of premium inventory. Why shouldn’t a performance-based media buyer like MediaMath or Infectious Digital buy across the closed media exchanges of massive publishers like the New York Times? They can simply plug-in to the closed exchanges and buy the premium inventory required for their clients.
Improve Digital’s CMX has attracted a lot of interest from big digital media companies in the UK, Europe and the US, as they look to venture into the exchange marketplace. The platform is a compelling proposition for large scale publishers, and will definitely raise the profile of the exchange model.
With so many ad exchange offerings available for media buyers, it can often be daunting trying to figure what works and what doesn’t. Exchanges offer an excellent platform for maximising the performance of client campaigns, but without knowledge of how they work their potential is not maximised.
The US market now has a multitude of exchange experts who buy on behalf of marketers and agencies.
The UK market has been a little slower to adopt these new platforms, but agencies and advertisers are now starting to pay attention and want to leverage these technologies.
One of the more interesting companies working in the space is a London-based company, The Exchange Lab. The company wants to simplify the process of buying across exchanges, offering a consultative ad exchange service to its clients.
It works closely with digital agencies in the UK to create customised bid strategies and manage campaign across different exchange platforms – minimising the knowledge, time and resource required to effectively trade and deliver optimum results.
Many of its key staff have a wealth of experience working on the agency side, and have a strong knowledge of the exchange model. Using this in-house exchange experience, The Exchange Lab helps agencies buy ad impressions in real time on the likes of RightMedia, the Doubleclick exchange and Wunderloop.
The success of early campaigns and the growing enthusiasm for the new technology has enabled The Exchange Lab to get on the media buying schedules of some of the biggest agencies.
This expertise will no doubt attract more agencies to employ their services in the coming months as they look to get more value from their media buy.
Global providers of web and instant messaging, ebuddy.com, announced today that they are joining the Yahoo-owned Right Media Exchange to monetise their inventory.
London – Right Media, a Yahoo! company and creator of the Right Media Exchange, announced today that eBuddy, a leading independent global provider of web and mobile instant messaging, has joined the Right Media Exchange to help monetise its advertising inventory.
Headquartered in Amsterdam and with additional offices in London and San Francisco, eBuddy provides a free web based chat application that is primarily used by students and young professionals.
eBuddy has more than 18 million unique monthly visitors, and will use the Exchange to better optimise its traffic and drive higher CPMs for its inventory. As the auction platform helps ensure the most relevant and highest paying ad will be served, this will help maximise site yield. The platform will facilitate eBuddy’s streamlining of its ad operations by improving workflows and helping remove traditional inefficiencies.
Rogier van den Heuvel, VP Worldwide Sales at eBuddy, comments: “The global nature of the Exchange supports the global nature of our product while helping to drive our monetisation strategy. This partnership will enable us to drive our worldwide growth by making it much easier to identify and establish relationships with relevant partners in our key target markets.”
Denise Colella, VP International at Right Media, comments: “Increasingly we are finding clients attracted to the platform because it supports their international ambitions. The Exchange very much complements the requirements of eBuddy. eBuddy brings a wealth of global supply that can be of strong interest to our advertisers across the world.”
Invite Media, a Philadelphia and New York-based exchange startup, has rolled out its new cross-exchange bid management tool. Aimed at agencies and ad networks, Bid Manager allows users to buy ad impressions across multiple ad exchanges in real-time through one interface. Several major agencies and ad networks are already using the Bid Manager platform.
Nat Turner, co-founder of Invite Media, believes it’s the first universal buying platform for the numerous ad exchanges presently available:
There are companies in the market, who claim they are offering a similar service, but our software is the first to offer agencies and ad networks this service as a platform. We are working with most of the major exchange players, such as Right Media, the DoubleClick exchange, and AdECN – and we have more about to come on board. We are trying to offer an “E-Trade” type service, with our software plugged into the top exchanges. We aim to provide a seamless real-time media buying process, and we want to give the media buyer the keys.
He is also encouraged about the potential of ad exchanges, and how they could transform the industry – but thinks the disintermediation of ad networks has been exaggerated:
There are some really interesting ad networks working in our industry, and there will continue to be a ton of ineffeciency. Instead of being taken out of the supply chain, I think they will evolve. There will certainly be some casualties, but in twelve to twenty-four months I see three types surviving: those using proprietary data; those offering buyers incredible technology to target audiences; and the agency-ad-network hybrid, which will compete for ad budget directly from advertisers. We call these new outfits “publisher-less networks,” in that they no longer manage large publisher bases, and instead focus their efforts on smarter buying.
The cost of this service will be based on the volume of inventory traded through Invite Media’s platform. Other companies, like MediaMath, are likely to launch a similar service in the coming months. All these developments will allow more marketers, agencies and ad networks to buy ad impression across multiple exchanges.
This new service from Invite Media will no doubt make the media buying process a lot easier, and is likely attract more buyers to the exchange model.
Infectious Media is now a member of the RightMedia Exchange. The digital agency aims to maximize campaign performance for its clients by buying media across the market-leading ad exchange.
London – Right Media (www.rightmedia.com), a Yahoo! company and creator of the Right Media Exchange, announces this month that independent digital media planning and buying agency, Infectious Media, has become the most recent agency to become a member of its Exchange.
Highlighted in NMA’s Top 100 Interactive Agencies 2008 as ‘the’ digital media agency ‘to watch’, Infectious represents a new breed of digital agency that is embracing emerging technologies, trading platforms and targeting techniques to drive more efficient campaigns for its clients.
It will use the Exchange to bring greater efficiencies across the whole online media buying process and execute data driven performance campaigns to achieve client ROI goals.
“We believe that exchanges are a critical component in the evolving infrastructural ecosystem. We’re building our agency and the way we work around these ‘new world’ platforms. This puts us in a better position to make intelligent buying decisions for our clients (in real time) and to drive much improved efficiency through display media. This is a very interesting and exciting time for agencies, advertisers and publishers alike, who will all benefit from greater market efficiencies. We’re delighted to be working with Right Media who have pioneered the exchange model, and is continuing to rapidly build liquidity in the UK and Europe” comments Andy Cocker, Founding Partner, Infectious Media.
Denise Colella, VP International at Right Media, comments: “The growing importance of technology and exchange platforms is dramatically changing the nature of buying online media. This is being recognised by forward thinking agencies like Infectious who are embracing the new opportunities emerging across the digital landscape.”
Rupert Murdoch must have have deep pockets. Very deep pockets. Today is the first day ole Rupe gets to test out his theory that, yes, people are prepared to part with their money for news content. He’s abandoned the free model and gone down the already failed route of charging for a commodity. He’s looked at the figures and rightly ascertained that the Times’ online content, in its present form, cannot financially support its dying offline business. Maybe the paywall will save the newspaper industry. But the reality is it won’t. 
» Dataxu released 
Glam announced yesterday that it intends to enter the ad server market. Glam Adapt is being touted by the company as the Ad Server 3.0 – moving display advertising beyond the click and measuring on engagement. They’d like the industry to see it as the brand advertiser’s ad server. Hmmm. What are the features? Well the first feature of the new Glam Adapt is the ability to buy audience at scale. Remember the ad net has over 160 global users in its network – and has an advertising-friendly female audience. Glam Adapt has a number of multi-targeting features, including behavioural, contextual, geo, retail data and cookie-based targeting. The new platform will have deeper audience insights, offering advertisers more tools to turn audience data into actionable insights. 
