• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, August 18, 2010

Auction marketplace AdBidCentral on Wednesday debuted a media futures platform for media buyers to plan and place campaigns in advance, while ostensibly maintaining control over pricing and availability of inventory.

AdBidCentral's technology endeavors to offer media buyers insights into future pricing for premium media, along with the efficient execution of campaigns using ad formats from rich media to video.

"We've developed our platform using tried and tested pricing algorithms on billions of impressions," said company founder and CEO Vivek Veeraraghavan. "The translation of which results in a real, usable solution."

Via AdBidCentral's platform, buyers place preliminary "riskless" bids on future site inventory within a certain pricing range, and responses are issued through AdBidCentral's availability and pricing repository predictions models as well as from sellers directly.

The platform then lets enables what it calls "cancelable" future contracts with pricing, placements and reach set on the day of contract.

Similar to rival services like Yahoo's Right Media, AdBidCentral launched its auction marketplace in late 2007.

Yet, what the company debuted in 2007 was "not a proprietary futures platform designed for high volume capabilities ready-to-go for agencies and in-house buyers," said an AdBidCentral spokeswoman.

Regarding Wednesday's launch, she added: "This platform also has enhanced predictive pricing, riskless bidding ... in place as well as optionally cancellable contracts."

Rather than an ad exchange, Veeraraghavan describes the marketplace as "a rolling upfront." Said Veeraraghavan: "Our focus is premium display advertising rather than providing a spot market for remnant inventory."

By investing in auction-based exchanges, top tech companies like Yahoo and Microsoft have sought to extend their online ad networks--thus creating one-stop shops for advertisers facing ever more fragmented audiences online.

Likewise, Veeraraghavan cites online audience fragmentation as the rationale behind AdBidCentral. AdBidCentral's marketplace, meanwhile, purports to be fully transparent, while its platform handles everything from booking, transacting, flight and reporting in one central location.