Commentary

Don't Let That Tricksy RTB Make You Pay Less (But You Already Know That)

"RTB could potentially motivate media buyers to erroneously pay lower prices to advertise online while still expecting equal performance."

That's what ExactDrive, a self-serve ad platform, derived after analyzing the performance and bid price of hundreds of online advertising campaigns.

The company wrote in a release announcing their findings that "just because real-time bidding (RTB) technology is being utilized to advertise online doesn't necessarily mean that the inventory should be purchased at a lower price."

But judging by the recently concluded OMMA RTB in Chicago, the industry already knows that. It's not just focused on cheap, cheaper, cheapest, and cheaperest.

When the final panel ended, MediaPost's Joe Mandese closed out the event by saying, "What I think is really beautiful about the whole day is that we talked very little about using RTB and programmatic to buy media cheaply. We talked largely about buying it more smartly and more effectively."

Of course, there will always be something to be said about buying media that gets the job done cheaply, but those remarks and the general feeling of the OMMA RTB event are part of the larger trend I'm noticing, which is that RTB no longer stands for race to the bottom.

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