• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, July 8, 2013

I recently met with Benjamin Christie, founder and president of Gourmet Ads, a food advertising network with their own exchange. The Australia-based company has been using real-time bidding (RTB) technology for about a year and a half now, and have settled into a nice niche with food, grocery, and CPG clients.

Christie and I talked at length about RTB, new programmatic technologies, the role of search and mobile, different regions, and where a food network can thrive. The conversation was interesting and a follow-up Q&A was in order. Take a look below to see Christie's thoughts on some hot topics in the space.

RTM Daily: You’ve been a player in RTB for about a little more than a year and a half…where do you see yourself in another year and a half?

Benjamin Christie: Gourmet Ads has taken, since November 2011, an “all-in” approach to RTB, initially making a portion of our inventory biddable. This changed significantly with our recent move to Appnexus, where RTB now actually competes with direct-sold inventory at different price points.

We’ve learned a great deal since starting. In the past 12 months we’ve seen the number of advertisers in the exchange grow by 150%, and we believe that this will continue to grow. We’ll also see more media traded via RTB-powered deals (you can call them private marketplaces if you want). I also think we’ll see all types of rich media being traded via RTB (including skins, over-the-page and Rising Star Units) available from buyers compared to the current limited number of IAB sizes today. 

RTM Daily: Can you explain the real-time publisher scoring system you hope to deploy? Is the system meant to keep advertisers informed, publishers honest, or both?

Christie: First and foremost our Web scoring system was developed to help our publisher team identify quality sites, ordinary sites, and less desirable sites. Our algorithm now looks at approximately 80 different data sources when determining our site score. We’ve since begun applying this technology to sites in the open exchange, thus helping us understand if a site is real, has a real audience and a strong social presence. 

RTM Daily: You described mobile as the “holy grail” for a company like Gourmet Ads, and plan a soft Q4 launch to get into mobile. Can you describe why the mobile space is so enticing?

Christie: Right now, more than 91% of our audience is comprised of grocery buyers at home or work looking at recipes. However, when the grocery buyer is in the grocery store putting items in their cart or basket, the only device available to look at recipes and ingredients is their mobile phone. In this case the mobile phone is the best point of sale device a brand marketer can have. It's effectively the last point in the sales cycle to advertise and influence a product sale while the grocery buyer is checking a recipe in the supermarket aisle. Now layer in the ability to serve a discount coupon or offer and you can see why I call it the “Holy Grail.”

RTM Daily: We also talked about search in conjunction with “premium.” What makes searchers such a premium audience on exchanges?

Christie: For the most part, third party data platforms are limited in what they can provide around interest data for our vertical, usually rolling the data into a category called “Food and Cooking.” Whereas because of our unique audience of grocery buyers and household cooks, we’re able to harvest search data which helps us significantly understand more about the type of recipe and food content an audience is interested in. In turn it’s this First Party Data that helps advertisers target on a granular basis with us. 

Just one example of what we’re doing with First Party Data from search: we’re classifying searchers into 170 categories. In a simple example, a person that searches “chicken risotto” will fall into four different audience categories – Chicken, Rice, Italian and Gourmet. Now for a chicken brand running a campaign, we can layer in the chicken category and know with certainty that the advertising will be relevant to the audience categorized as Chicken. One of the challenges is the small search volumes, and our team over the coming months will work to develop significantly larger audience pools using new technologies. 

RTM Daily: You said that robot traffic keeps you up at night. Why? 

Christie: In the recent aftermath of the stories about fraudulent traffic in the industry, we deployed technologies to help us identify sites both in our network and sites in our third party audience extension pool that had suspicious behavior associated with them. We immediately expelled six sites from the network and removed dozens of sites from our third party targeting lists. We now constantly monitor all impressions served and monitor for all suspicious behavior. Any site that sets off alarm bells is removed from the network.

What keeps me up at night is how we prevent sites doing the wrong thing from applying to join our network, getting through our application process and eventually being approved and serving impressions. From our experience, sites doing the wrong thing are going to great lengths to make their sites and audiences look real, from on-site comments to fake social profiles. We’ve just embarked on developing technology which might help us identify these sites before they serve a single impression. 

RTM Daily: Gourmet Ads is targeting more expansion in the U.S., but many are predicting Europe to really adopt programmatic because of how segmented it is. What’s the strategy behind your global expansion?

Christie: Our core focus for the next 12 months is to continue to expand our U.S. and Canadian audiences. That said, we will continue to build our UK, Australian and New Zealand audiences as required, but in terms of entering new markets we’ll do this subtly via RTB, finding great partners in markets where we see opportunities. We have a few regular programmatic buyers in France, Germany and Latin America, but in our experience the CPM rates haven’t been that strong in those markets to date. Our publishers demand high CPMs for their inventory, so new markets will be determined around revenue projections.

RTM Daily: The Asian/APAC market doesn’t excite you. Why not?

Christie: Once again, experience has shown that CPMs haven’t been strong across Asia.  Add to this the fact we haven’t seen that many endemic food and wine advertisers in the past. 

RTM Daily: Thanks for your time!