Ad Exchange

Robin Davies is Country Manager UK at Mediaplex. Here he discusses why we should be re-thinking attribution and why the industry should be basing models more on atatistical analysis.

Digital marketing is supposed to have solved John Wanamaker’s question: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” But the reality is that while digital media is strides ahead of “old” media in terms of accountability, there is still some way to travel before we can give brands a wholly accurate account of the multiple variables that influence people’s online purchase decision-making.

It is little wonder then that last click versus cross channel attribution, or “fractional attribution”, is one of the most hotly debated topics in digital marketing.

That the industry should focus on the appealing simplicity of last click attribution, which directly aligns spend with sales, was perhaps inevitable in order to achieve a standard around which it could unify and grow.

It’s also natural now that digital marketing is maturing, and accounting for a large proportion of client spend, that we should seek to move on from the blunt instrument of last click.

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AppNexus Addresses the Challenges of Rich Media in RTB

AppNexus Console customers now have a fully-featured Creative Template capability, the company announced last week.

The challenge for RTB is matching the capabilities of the creative to the expectations of the publisher for that particular placement. In most ad serving environments this challenge is minimised since the same group of people — ad operations, or “ad ops” — generally sets the rules for what can serve, and also manages the development of the creative rendering code. In an RTB environment the seller and buyer are only connected by APIs and protocols.

To address the problem of rich media in RTB, AppNexus introduced the use of a Media Type. A Media Type is set by a seller on a placement and lets the system know what types of creatives are eligible to be served. To ensure expandable ads run properly across sites, AppNexus has mapped hundreds of placements on their platform to specific vendors of expandables, with the goal that an advertiser can buy expandables at scale on AppNexus and know that the ads are going to expand properly.

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YD Launches New Proprietary Real-Time Trading Platform

On the heels of the announcement of their new international offices in France and Italy, YD announces this week the launch of its proprietary trading platform for high frequency media trading and audience targeting, which will eventually be launched across all countries where they have a presence.

The technology of the in-house trading platform completes the YD RT4-technology consisting of four modules. Niels Baarsma, COO and co-founder of YD comments: “In the RTB part, we are now able to deliver high-frequency media trading. We connect data from the advertisers directly to the bidder. Thereby, we connect to the ROI expectation of advertisers who increasingly combine branding and performance investments.”

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There are reports in the French media that Le Collective – a loose alliance between some of France’s top publishers – has agreed to set up the first publisher exchange in France. The alliance is made up of TF1, Lagardère, Figaro Médias and Amaury – and represents some of the market’s biggest premium publishers. The idea behind the move is to offer the market a premium channel for automated buys. The French trade press is also reporting that Le Collective has agreed to enter into a partnership with The Rubicon Project to power the new exchange. All unsold inventory will be put into the new Le Collective exchange, but it is not known if the inventory will be open to all buyers on the market – or if it will act as a private marketplace.

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Richard Sharp is UK MD Media and Head of Trading at ValueClick. Here he discusses the centralising of the retargeting and why ad networks can still add value with their audience and delivery expertise.

From an ad network point of view there is much that we at ValueClick Media would concur with in Doug Conely’s response to Vivaki’s extraordinary piece selling the alleged benefits of centralising retargeting.

It is tempting again to pick over the issues raised, because – as Doug points out – for each and every one there is a very robust and rational counter argument.

We’ve all seen the mechanics of the digital display market and the different players within it evolve at an incredible pace. Agency trading desks are operating like networks, but at the same time progressive ad networks with scale are in fact adding the same kind of strategic added value that agencies are supposed to.

Let’s face facts, the lines of interest have blurred and there are reasonable questions to be asked about how different interests are being represented.

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Wildfire Integrates Adaptly’s Social Advertising Technology To Optimise Engagement

Wildfire, a global leader in social media marketing software, announced this week the integration of Adaptly’s social advertising and optimisation technology within the Wildfire Social Marketing Suite. Wildfire’s Marketing Suite is currently used by more than 10,000 customers, including Facebook, Amazon, and Target. Adaptly’s ad optimisation technology gives marketers unified control over the combined effect of paid, earned and owned social media in an endeavour to maximise consumer engagement with the brand.

Unlike first-generation ad serving solutions, which focus on traditional metrics such as cost-per-clicks, fans or impressions, Adaptly’s proprietary technology aggregates more than 160 social metrics from a brand’s earned and owned channels, then analyses the impact of paid media on earned media in real time to continuously refine ads.

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Flexing Market Muscle: 24/7 Real Media Looks To Aggregate Dynamic Supply With New Real-Time Bidding (RTB) Offering

24/7 Real Media, WPP’s marketing technology company, announced this week the availability of real-time bidding (RTB) to UK publishers within its proprietary ad management technology, Open AdStream®.

24/7 Real Media’s new RTB proposition will allow publishers to put their inventory into one ecosystem that dynamically allocates revenue and delivers optimal yield. This capability allows publishers to filter and assign value to biddable inventory based on audience and context.

Nicolle Pangis, President, Europe at 24/7 Real Media, comments: “A controlled approach to RTB improves publishers’ ability to identify the actual worth of each segment of inventory on their site. Similarly, advertisers are guaranteed quality inventory from an auction environment that ensures their messages are targeted effectively and most likely to resonate with online users.”

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OpenX announced today that it was acquiring LiftDNA for to beef up its yield management offering. Here Tim Cadogan speaks about the deal, and what it means for publisher clients.

Can you give some details on the deal between OpenX and LiftDNA?

We’re not able to disclose the specific details of the deal in financial terms. However, it’s important to note that, unlike many other acquisitions, we are already integrated and can actually able to offer the combining product, LiftDNA by OpenX™, immediately. In fact, we have been working together for clients since 2010 and already seeing significant increase in revenue for publishers: LiftDNA is already increasing publisher yield 50-150% on average.

For those non-US readers, can you give some background on the LiftDNA proposition?

LiftDNA is the first and only SSP technology to work completely within a publisher’s ad server. By directly managing all non-guaranteed demand channels – demand-side platforms (DSPs), ad networks, traditional supply-side platforms and exchanges – from inside the ad server, LiftDNA is able to process all available pricing information for the publisher and thereby maximize competition and revenue. Furthermore, because it operates within the ad server, LiftDNA reduces discrepancies and system latency, both of which further increase publisher revenue.

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