» There was an excellent article yesterday on Imedia about the necessity of the DSP within the current exchange eco-system. Written by Eric Prichard, advertising technology advisor at Microsoft, it explores the pivotal role DSPs will play in buying inventory in real-time for agencies and advertisers. The blog post also covers some high level subjects including the idea of low density bids and asymmetric bidding in second place auction and how this might result in low CPM prices paid for impressions. To counter this, Prichard believes that dynamic floors will be introduced on RTB inventory whereby platforms will price ad impressions accordingly based on historical trends (how much much buyers paid for inventory in past auctions?) and past performance. It would seem likely that if publishers are to open up inventory through RTB they are going to have to work closer with the SSPs and Google. Publishers will probably not have the resource or the financial muscle to build out their own platforms. Great piece for the more progressive thinkers among you. [Imedia]

» Interesting chart published by BusinessInsider yesterday. The chart shows the sites serving the most display ads to US users. It is for the US market only, but demonstrates how much ad inventory Facebook has. But let's be honest about it, it is pretty poor quality inventory. The CPMs ar ridiculously low for a reason. Serving up branding against user generated content is not going to going to add value. From a DR perspective, I hear Facebook is perfomring very well. It's targeting is the envy of most platforms. I don't think display is the future for Facebook though. It's better off looking at the data angle: selling data to ad agencies, advertisers and anyone else on the buy side could be a very lucrative revenue stream for Facebook. But it's likely the EU will stop that in its tracks, judging by the noise coming out of Brussels today. [Business Insider]