• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, June 17, 2009

Carrying on the great ad network v. publisher debate, Turner and ESPN sound like they have few regrets about turning their backs on ad networks to sell their own inventory. "We learned the independent market was being arbitraged against us and how big the opportunity cost was," said Walker Jacobs, svp of sports and entertainment digital ad sales at Turner. He indicated the network can now activate its audience of 60 million more effectively for large sponsorships selling on its own.

Richard Frankel of Rocket Fuel and Alan Schanzer of Undertone Networks took up the defense of ad networks. Frankel stressed the importance of ad networks in bringing technology to the table to sell ivnentory more effectively and said his company actually gets higher CPMs for publishers than they can get selling directly. Jacobs countered using technolgy to target audience is well and good, but with blind ad entworks and exchanges, publishers don't know where ads are winding up on the Web--what the context is.