Paul Silver is Digital Direct Response Manager at MEC Manchester.

2009. What a year. I am sure many in this space will agree that 2009 was the year that many woke up and realised that change was necessary. Change to the way we buy media, change to the way we serve advertising and fundamentally change to the rules of the display game (I appreciate that many innovators are currently ripping up the rulebook and pushing our industry forward).

For those just joining the conversation: if DSP and RTB are new acronyms to you, then where have you been? Stick to your PPC and SEO! In all seriousness, this year has seen some major traction from the major holding companies’ DSPs (mainly in the US). New tech firms are emerging every week it seems and VC investment has been flowing in line with this, despite what has been deemed as the biggest recession for thirty years. Data exchanges are becoming key to any media purchasing - and we have arrived at the stage of being able to spot-buy impressions, in real-time (depending on who in this space you speak to!).

Ad personalisation is becoming a major component of display campaigns, serving relevant ads to relevant users amongst relevant content (Dapper.net, Teracent, etc etc). Advertising is becoming more dynamic and offering much more of a service to the users it targets rather than simply signposting the ads on a page.

Ad exchanges are also beginning to have an affect on the display buying landscape. The re-launch of Google’s Adx has had some early success, and is increasing participation in exchange based trading. Other exchanges continue to develop their own platforms, offering strong trading opportunities for progressive ad networks, ad trading companies, data exchanges, analytics firms, and arbitrage traders.

For someone working agency side, these shifts in how we buy display advertising are welcome. The way we buy, the way we manage campaigns and the way we serve ads to our users had to change. It needed to change for this sector to really continue growing (or at least sustain their % of media budgets).

How has all this affected the online display market in the UK? The developments mentioned above have thus far struggled to gain any real traction in the UK, and are certainly not mainstream yet. Networks are still networks. Irrelevant ads continue to be served to irrelevant users. CPA performance networks still take most network budgets (not that this is wrong but being reliant on view based conversions is no way to underpin the buying strategy of a campaign).

To move beyond this however we need to see a fundamental shift in the way we buy media. Advertisers who are unwilling to take risks and only trade on CPA metrics are stunting this innovation. It means removing [a large CPA based performance network] from the media schedule and investing in new opportunities and new ways to advertise. Some of these will work and some will fail. It is the fear of the unknown however which causes an element of reluctance to move beyond the ‘bread and butter’ of media schedules.

Admittedly, 2009 has been a tough year for advertisers. The ‘contingency’ or ‘test’ budget of old simply does not exist anymore. I am however a firm believer in the old English saying, ‘he who dares wins’. Those that are brave enough to embrace new technologies NOW will be better prepared for the future once we get out of this recession.

Advertisers need to have some blind faith. Otherwise we will forever be confined to sticking budget into CPA networks who serve bundles of inventory into below the fold placements and hope that at some stage (within said cookie window) the user heads over to the advertiser’s site and purchases. Is there actual any value to this?

The buck does not lie solely with advertisers of course. Agencies also need to change the way they operate in this data driven era. They need to invest in the systems to facilitate this change but above all else recognise that this is required. Buying relevant cookie data (easier said than done of course in the UK) and pairing it with ad impressions bought within a bid auction environment is no mean feat to achieve. Serving up interactive, dynamic ads which are optimised in real-time based on machine learning, and then taking users to dynamic landing pages is again another huge task.

The question we need to ask of ourselves in the UK is how do we change the infrastructure of the current model to move with the times? What systems do we need? Just by asking these questions will see us moving in the right direction.

2010 promises to be quite a year. With Invite Media and other DSPs looking to launch here 2010, I feel more budget will be spent on buying media across ad exchanges – and less will be thrown blindly across a network’s entire inventory set. Agencies need not worry about the inefficiencies (in terms of resource) of managing individual line items across exchanges as trading platforms such as Invite and MediaMath assist this process.

We adopted Search. We adopted the technology it brought to the table. It has been a long time coming but let’s give Display a chance.