• by Skip Brand , July 18, 2014

In June 2003, Google AdSense was launched to help Web site owners earn money from content-related text ads. Google quickly changed to display ads to help reach specific audiences and in 2006, had over 1 million publishers.

In 2009, expandable formats and native-like ads launched, social media measurement was brought to the scene, and finally display ads outnumbered text. By October 2011, Google had over 1 billion daily transactions a day on mobile phones. 

In fact, more transactions happen each day with AdSense than on all the world’s major stock exchanges. Today, nearly all of the top 200 comScore sites use the platform.

If we are in the first inning of programmatic and exchanged-based advertising, the concept of BrandSense, like AdSense, can help publishers simplify how brand advertisers buy their inventory. BrandSense needs to mirror AdSense in its development, including the following:

1.     A simple method for buying media cross-platform both publicly and privately.

2.     Added intelligence, targeting, and audiences to a bid marketplace or auction.

3.     Real-time infused with data science and future bookings.

4.     Connecting sellers and buyers with transparency.

5.     Simple controls, measures and reporting.

Brand advertisers want the first-look opportunity to buy the most premium audience inventory. AdSense and BrandSense is the perfect analogy, since search is a comparable digital predecessor. Search is a 100% programmatically traded supply and demand marketplace, on which the auction or exchange is cross-platform.

In a diffuse market, metrics or a BrandScore can enable BrandSense – a product that interprets the needs of the advertiser. It can find the right audience or inventory for a media buy at the best price possible.  A single score or metric can do this along with an interpreter like BrandSense.

Adding intelligence through targeting audiences allows BrandSense in a premium programmatic world to beat the search equivalent AdSense. The latter had an innovative but crude buying method for search. The addition of brand analytics also adds another layer of targeting for brand advertisers looking for single share of voice like they are used to in a TV environment.

Media buying and selling for future markets takes more effort and smarter APIs to consider time, seasonality, predictive scarcity and the premium scatter market.  BrandSense needs to offer a full suite of tools from traditional rule setting for an ad exchange, to selling specifically to publishers’ ad spaces, to private pre-approved buyers for futures buying (advanced bookings).

Infusing data science into the BrandScore and BrandSense is best done in an exchange or auction, which has transparency in both the open and private exchanges. BrandSense tools, unlike AdSense, need transparency for brand advertisers.  

Many have complained about the AdSense environment because of Google’s tight standards. BrandSense controls are market driven and third-party validated. Meta-analysis, open rules and transparency make the concept of BrandSense a much better method to help encourage brand advertisers to be more comfortable buying premium programmatic. 

If BrandSense can do for premium programmatic what AdSense did for Google, the real-time-branding ecosystem is in for some exciting growth, challenges and opportunities.