The Publisher panel focused on sell-side issues and the opportunity for publishers in the emerging data-driven display space (note the mention of the Publisher Trading Desk and the pan-European publisher exchange here). This panel included: Tom Barnett, Director, Switch Concepts; Martin Van Der Meij, Yield Manager, De Telegraaf; Tim Gentry, Head of Optimisation & Effectiveness at Guardian Commercial; Jonathan Wolf, Chief Buying Officer, Criteo; and Nicholas Timms, Head Of Network Products, A&NY Media.

Dapper is now taking its well-received panel series to London. The very first European Fixing Advertising event will take place on Tuesday, September 21 at the Hospital Club from six o’clock. The panel for the evening will include: Alex Gilbert, Director of Online Partner Marketing EMEA, Expedia; Stephen Taylor, former CEO, Type; Joseph Leon, Head of Media, Essence; John Glenna, Director of Ad Products, Microsoft; Pierre Nagger, Head of Direct Response UK, Yahoo!; and of course Jon Aisne, COO, Dapper. The panel will be moderated by the reclusive ad tech blogger, Ciaran O’Kane. It should be a great evening of debate – and there’s also a free bar. You can’t go wrong! If you are looking to attend, you can get more information on the Fixing Advertising site.

While the exchange space is still nascent in Japan, there is a lot of interest from buyers and sellers in the automated channel. The Japanese display market is worth about 3.5 billion euro – just slightly behind Europe’s total size. The significance of this deal is that Japanese inventory will soon be opened up to global ad traders. Media buyers across Europe and rest of the world (particularly the US and Australia) will soon be able to buy inventory on Japanese sites. There are potentially some big opportunities for agencies to grab more international marketing budget as barriers to markets come crashing down. A global exchange with access to local ad markets presents a huge opportunity for media buyers – and of course to ad sellers who will have more exposure to demand partners.

Here’s the press release in full:

TOKYO and LOS ANGELES, August 31, 2010 cyber communications inc. (“cci”), Japan’s leading media representative company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Dentsu Inc., and OpenX Technologies, Inc. (OpenX), the world’s leading independent provider of digital advertising technology, today announced a multi-year partnership to launch OpenX Market Japan, a new online advertising exchange model designed to lead the evolution of online exchanges in Japan. Under the terms of the exclusive partnership, cci will bring the benefits of OpenX’s proven global ad marketplace to Japanese publishers, advertisers and agencies at a local level. The launch will take place in the fourth quarter of 2010.

OpenX Market Japan will increase the value of display advertising and maximize publishers’ revenue by helping advertisers much more easily reach their target audiences across large numbers of websites. Specifically, the new partnership will be a powerful combination of cci’s market expertise and supply and demand relationships in the Japanese market and OpenX’s global technology platform and innovative marketplace design. OpenX Market Japan is part of OpenX’s new global approach to online advertising marketplaces that allows major online media companies in key regions to participate directly in building exchange value chains.

The Japanese online advertising market was worth an estimated $7.4 billion in 2009 and is projected to grow to more than $10 billion by 2014*, a growth rate of more than 42%. It is the second largest online advertising market in the world.

OpenX will power OpenX Market Japan by providing the regionally specific toolset required for success in Japan alongside the core technology and market design of the global OpenX Market, which already reaches more than 400 million unique users monthly**. cci is the first Asian partner in a global, interconnected alliance of regional partners driving participation into OpenX Market.

“We’re extremely pleased to be partnering with cci, a subsidiary of Dentsu, to develop Japan’s first truly open online ad exchange,” said Tim Cadogan, chief executive officer, OpenX. “Furthermore, we’re delighted for the first time to have the digital arm of a major global advertising group participating in OpenX Market. We believe cci will help to rapidly accelerate the exchange’s growth in Japan.”

OpenX Market Japan will enable publishers to maximize their ad revenue by selling their inventory via a powerful exchange where all classes of buyers compete for each impression in a real-time auction. The auction will be run for every single impression in real-time with a minimum “floor price” set by the publishers.
OpenX Market Japan will feature a number of key and unique benefits:

Benefits for publishers

• Revenue maximization: In addition to their own direct (guaranteed) ad sales, publishers can increase revenue by selling their non-guaranteed inventory in a real-time auction market in which all classes of buyers compete on an impression by impression basis.
• Zero economic risk: OpenX Market Japan allows publishers to set the floor or reserve price for each impression, ensuring price protection.
• Control: The platform features enable publishers to keep control over their inventory, the ads actually displayed on their inventory and the floor price set for their inventory.
• Simple user experience: OpenX Market Japan allows publishers to participate with just one click of a button. Payments are consolidated into one monthly check.
• Excellent support: All tools are in Japanese, pricing and billing are in yen and all technical and customer support is provided by local teams.
• Global access: Publishers have access to a large range of advertisers at the international, national and local levels.

Benefits for advertisers and agencies

• Return on investment: Enables advertisers and agencies to increase their performance by reaching their target audience at scale.
• Simplicity: OpenX Market Japan provides advertisers and agencies with simple and powerful ways to buy across a potentially enormous pool of diverse, primary inventory. Advertisers and agencies can immediately access and buy ad inventory, while making just one consolidated payment even when buying across multiple currencies.
• Efficiency: Advertisers and agencies can define and buy ad inventory based on their unique targeting criteria across a combination of large and niche publishers.
• Transparency: Advertisers and agencies maintain complete control over where their ads are displayed.
• Global access: Advertisers and agencies can buy from anywhere and consolidate their purchases at a region level.
• Immediacy: Real-time bidding on both the client and server side and immediate access to auctions ensure an instant and fair bidding process.

* Source: Nomura Research Institute, Ltd.
** Source: Quantcast

Here’s the press release in full:

Duesseldorf, August 30, 2010. AdAudience is switching service providers and will start collaborating with nugg.ad AG on September 1, 2010. By that time, the complete system integration of AdAudience will be finished so that a smooth transition from Wunderloop to nugg.ad is guaranteed. Ten socio-demographic target group specifications and 65 affinity characteristics derived from the user behaviour in the AdAudience network will be available immediately.

On September 1, AdAudience will also offer its advertising partners three new types of advertising media for clients and agencies, which are meant to satisfy the increasing demand for branding-specific online advertising: The Banderole and Maxi ad from the premium package will be available for booking and the Flash layer will be integrated. Directly at the start of its collaboration with nugg.ad, AdAudience will also launch new products on the market: ‘Frequency targeting’ will be offered to optimise contact classes in the entire AdAudience network by enabling an optimisation of the campaigns according to contact corridors. Products such as the ‘branding optimiser’ will also be available to make the branding effect measurable and optimise campaigns according to this parameter. In this context, AdAudience can identify individual target groups in the pre-stages of the campaign so that the advertisements can be directed even more precisely.

Frank Herold, Managing Director of AdAudience: “We are looking forward to our collaboration with nugg.ad in the future. We have a shared understanding of the market and the same ideas about how we can advance the targeting market with our solutions. We are expanding our existing portfolio by developing additional exciting products, which can offer a particularly high value in AdAudience’s premium-quality and wide-reaching network.”

Karim H. Attia, Member of the Executive Board at nugg.ad AG: “With AdAudience, we are gaining a partner whose core business consists of marketing valuable target groups with a large, qualitative reach. We are very pleased about joining with Frank Herold and his team to continue establishing our vision of digital brand communication on the market. The combination of our Predictive Targeting Technology with the advertising formats of the Premium AdPackage and qualitative ranges provided by AdAudience is a fantastic offer for the advertising industry.”

That’s probably why you’ve seen little big agency activity in the mobile ad space (iAd being the exception), and why the ad budgets flowing into the mobile display channel have been anaemic. There’s also the little issue of tracking campaigns across mobile. A lot of campaign reporting relies heavily on numbers supplied from mobile ad networks and publishers, making it nearly impossible to verify CTRs and campaign performance being reported by the sell-side. A lot of the time the agencies are blind. The trafficking of ads is also an issue for agencies. A lot of the trafficking has to be done manually by the ad networks or publisher. It’s very inefficient, and difficult to manage. Now I’m just wondering with the release of Mobile for DFA how many ad nets and indeed publishers will be integrated with DFA Mobile. Will it just be Admob to start with? I would love to know the thoughts of any “independent” mobile ad nets out there.

Here are the new DFA Mobile features in full:

Serve mobile ads in DFA

Trafficking mobile ads in DFA is easy. You use the same process as you would for any campaign in DFA. Mobile is just another ad type and placement type that you would select within the DFA trafficking interface. You don’t even need to create a separate campaign for your mobile ads in DFA, you can include them in any existing campaign alongside the rest of your online creatives assets.

Serve mobile ads to a variety of mobile platforms

DFA mobile ads are designed to be trafficked on inventory that is optimized for mobile browsers or within a mobile application. Tailor your message to each of the major mobile platforms and automatically serve the appropriate Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) creative size to a broad array of mobile devices. You also have many of the existing DFA targeting features at your disposal such as day-parting, keywords and geo-targeting.

Integrated reporting

With fully integrated reporting you get mobile impression and click data all in the same place as the standard DFA reports. There is also a mobile-specific report which shows a breakdown of stats for your mobile placement by wireless carrier, mobile platform and country.

Mobile-optimized tags

The mobile placement in DFA generates tags that are optimized to run on a wide variety of mobile devices ensuring that your campaign has the reach you desire. These tags work seamlessly with the Doubleclick Mobile publisher platform and have been tested successfully on a number of other leading publisher technology providers. If you’re a publisher and want to accept DFA mobile placements, just log into your site directory account or email sd-support@google.com.

Standard ads go mobile too

As many mobile phones come with full Internet browsers, you’ll often find that your standard ads are being viewed on mobile devices too. So, alongside the mobile placements we’re also releasing mobile browser targeting for standard ads. This gives you the opportunity to control the creative you serve alongside standard web content when it is viewed on a mobile device (e.g., iPhone, iPad or Android devices).

1. Advertiser: A company sponsoring advertisement and ultimately responsible for the message delivered to the consumer. Example: DoubleClick

2. Exchange: A provider of marketplace connecting advertisers to ad networks and data aggregators (online and off), often facilitating multiple connections and bidding processes. Example: Right Media

3. Network: A broker and often technology provider connecting advertisers and publishers. (web site operators) Example: Burst Media

4. Online Data Aggregator: Collects data from online publishers and provides it to advertisers either directly or via exchange. Example: BlueKai

5. Offline Data Aggregator: Collects data from a range of offline sources and provides data to advertisers directly or via exchange. Experian

6. Publisher: Website operator who displays ads for advertiser(s) in various types campaigns. Example: The New York Times

7. Optimizer: Provider of analytics technology and services for ROI assessment and content optimization purposes. Example: ROILabs

8. Research: Collects data for market research purposes where no ads are serviced through this data. Example: Example: Safecount

9. Retargeter: Providers of technologies that allow publishers to identify their visitor when they place ads on third party sites. Example: FetchBack

10. Analytics Provider: Provider of cross-platform statistical analysis to understand market effectiveness and audience segmentation. Example: Google Analytics

11. Agency: Provider of creative and buying services (both audience and data) for advertisers. Example: MediaCom

12. Ad Server: Technology that delivers and tracks advertisements independently of the web site where the ad is being displayed. Example: DoubleClick DART

13. Demand-Side Platform: A technology provider that allows marketers to buy inventory across multiple platforms or exchanges. DSPs often layer in custom optimization, audience targeting, real-time bidding and other services. Example: Invite Media

14. Supply-Side Platform: A technology provider that allows publishers to access advertiser demand across multiple platforms or exchanges. SSPs often layer in custom yield optimization, audience creation, real-time bidding and other services. Example: AdMeld

15. Ad Verification: Certifies or classifies webpages in an effort to prevent advertisers’ campaigns from running on unsavory or blocked content, and/or protects advertisers from having other companies run their ads incorrectly. Example: ClickForensics

16. Online Privacy: Technology providers that deliver information and transparency to consumers on how 3rd party companies gather and use their data. Example: Better Advertising

Nobody in sufficient economic numbers will pay for news when it’s free on the BBC, the Guardian, Yahoo, Microsoft and other sources. Only business critical content can command a price – fact. Remember newspapers only really charged in order to cover distribution costs. The fat profits made by newspaper companies were mostly from advertising. The model for making “hard cash” was simple: limited ad space in newspapers meant ad prices were high for the industry. The web changed the game. The nearly unlimited number of news sources on the net has driven online prices into the ground.

Why? Most in the industry say it’s the fault of oversupply. Partly. But the main reason is that offline publishers tried to apply their tried and tested sales model to online. For a long time sales people were selling on context and reputation alone. Audience was a mere afterthought. Understanding audience and how they interacted with your content was something that was overlooked. And now audience buying is the mantra of the industry. Agencies and advertisers don’t want to buy context – they want to buy audience. I think this shift will unlock a lot of new revenue for online publishers – and audience data will lead the charge.

NI will undoubtedly lose a lot of traffic – worthless they will say as these freeloaders aren’t paying for news content. Fair enough. But I’m sure they will find other sources of information to access. Those pubs will benefit as they will be able to leverage that audience to generate more revenue from targeted ads or data trading. This “paywall” issue is worthy of a longer indepth post, but I’ll leave that to the likes of Paidcontent and Buzzmachine. I’m only really interested in the online display market – and what effect taking all that quality inventory off the market will have on industry CPM prices. In the short-term, the industry is likely to see a bump. But if they are to have a commercial future, pubs will need to be become absolutley obsessed about their data and how it can be best used to unlock new revenue. I will explore some of these ideas in the coming weeks. In the meantime I would love to see how much NI’s traffic collapses, and who will likely benefit? Any data would be gratefully accepted.

Here’s the major points from the report:

- The power of creative remains significant. Audience and context targeting can be highly effective, but creative parameters still edged out both for their influence on campaign success. Creative agencies can partner with an advanced DSP to be a powerful extension of their capabilities—and prove to their clients—using data—the value of their creative.
- Even similar campaigns have different performance drivers. The most predictive category was not consistent for campaigns within the same industry vertical—or even for separate campaigns by the same advertiser.
- “Perfecting” one dimension is risky. Trying to predict which category matters most and putting all of your targeting or optimization “eggs” in one of these three baskets may not yield the desired ROI. Basic techniques like cookie retargeting leave opportunity on the table.
- Advertisers need to adopt a “global optimization” approach to performance. We all know that display advertising has multiple variables affecting performance. As we’ve discovered, the significance of these variables can be challenging to predict, so marketers should seek a global approach to optimizing campaign performance that looks across attributes before homing in on key performance drivers.

» Ah the great debate about how display is becoming more like search continues to rumble on. This week it’s the turn of Mark Fagan in the NMA. Fagan suggests that DSPs open up a whole new world of opportunity for search experts. Sure, they will be able to buy impressions in an auction based environment, and use search data to target users. But they will still need to convert, and in display creative still plays a big role. It’s not something that pure search firms will excel in. I guess when Google get around to integrating Teracent’s dynamic ad technology into their shiny new DSP kit (aka Invite Media) they will be in opportunity to compete properly in the exchange space. It all suggests momentum for automated trading now that the search wonks are seriously eyeing the exchange trading opportunities. Let the games begin.

This all sounds very familiar. Doesn’t every buy-side vendor offer something similar? True. But new API’s enables easier integration for DSPs. It also is offering some inventory through RTB. This is significant, as Glam has decent inventory. Selling ad servers to agencies is not easy, especially when Google has such a stranglehold over the market. My bet is that it’s not going after DoubleClick at all. Glam already has an exchange – and I reckon that Glam Adapt is just an upgrade with new spanking new features. This move is a good way for the company to sell more of its premium audience to buy-side traders – a shift to self-service automated trading. The inventory sources are becoming more plentiful and the quality of ad impressions becoming better by the week. The market continues to evolve. [Glam Media]

And now the lovely GlamAdapt grpah, explaining the evolution of the ad server:

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.”