Ad Network

Online Gaming Company, Spil Games, Explores The Revenue Opportunities Around RTB

Spil Games is a global online casual gaming network, with 2.23 million unique visitors and 170 million impressions per month in Germany. The company, headquartered in Hilversum, the Netherlands, are reaping the rewards of monetising its portal pages through RTB on non-guaranteed inventory.

Stefan Beckmann, Country Manager for Spil Games Germany, explains their model.

“Games are always in need of explanation as advertising environments more than, for example, news sites. But online gaming has a huge potential for advertisers to target their relevant audience. Our predominantly female and juvenile audience is obviously not important for all advertisers, but there are many who want to address just those users.”

Spil games always has a percentage of their inventory not marketed via the Spil Games direct sales team, however this percentage varies by period.

“In the intense fourth quarter, the proportion of branding campaigns for leading global brands is very high.” Beckmann adds, “Purely based on impressions, however, the proportion of performance campaigns is always higher, as we often implement branding campaigns with large custom-size or integrated solutions, which of course achieve much higher CPMs.”

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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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Tom Barnett is the Managing Director at Switch Concepts. Here he discusses the importance of the customisable real-time platform when trading ad inventory at the impression level, the huge potential for publishers to increase yield, and the critical piece the decision engine will play in all automated trades.

It could be argued that the online advertising trade has been stuck in a perpetual bear market since the dot.com bubble burst. That is to say that the overall average clearing price of inventory (ecpm) has been in a fairly steady state of descent. This is not to be confused with the fact that the online advertising market has grown year on year in that time – I am talking particularly about the price at which an advertising impression, in all formats, trades. It is easy to argue that this is a very clever ploy on the behalf of advertisers, which, whilst not entirely untrue, is not the major factor. I think the major factor has been widespread inefficiency in the 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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Is it bad etiquette to respond such a long time after an original opinion piece? I didn’t read this too closely at the at the time but poor Paolo, our Starcom and Zenith rep, has been hassling me to take another look. He thought he was selling business to business online display media under contractual terms. Reading this he felt like he was selling cigarettes to kids in West Africa. Should he? Absolutely not. We’re a serious business operating at global scale with all the strategic, operational, technical and ethical requirements that entails. Many of our competitors feel the same way, I’m sure.

While this article was not directed at Tribal Fusion specifically we are an ad network with views on some of the underlying arguments here. Marco, I saw your comment in the original post about anonymous responders. Let me put it this way: how can a vendor take the risk to debate the opinion of a (potential?) customer publicly? Well, here goes…

Data leakage

Paul & Geoff, we spoke about this 12-18 months ago and my view hasn’t changed. If you think there are people abusing 1st party data then name them. It should be game over for them or let them defend their position. In many ways this is the reverse of publishers complaining that *some* ATDs were bullying them into data deals in the past in return for media spend or that they were harvesting data without the publisher’s permission. Both insinuations are unhealthy to the industry and both sides should name those they believe to be carrying out such practices.

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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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Emma Wilson is Managing Director at Harvest Digital. Here she discusses the agency’s trading desk, why ad networks are still important to the eco-system, the evolution of the agency model and competing with the big agency networks.

Harvest set-up its own agency trading desk late last year. What was the motivation behind this? Why would an independent agency, like Harvest Digital, needs its own in-house capabilities?

Harvest is at heart a performance agency and we’re very familiar with auction-models from our large involvement in search marketing. So setting up our own trading desk has been a very natural step.

We announced last year that we were working with Appnexus, but we actually started working with Right Media back in 2008, so we are not at all new to the space.

How does any agency in-house the media optimisation function over the space of three months – when for the last 15 years it has been outsourced to third party buyers?

We’ve been buying and optimising digital media for ten years – which of course is longer than most networks have been in existence. Our trafficking has always been in-house, and at the heart of our approach to media is an ongoing optimisation process once a buy is in place. We have never walked away from a plan once it’s bought, although obviously you do hear about that happening in the market.

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