• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 25, 2013

YieldMetrics will rebrand to Adomic next week, emphasizing the company's focus on real-time bidding to support advertisers moving ad dollars to RTB, according to co-founder and CEO Gabe Gottlieb.

Stephanie Grossman has joined the executive team as senior vice president of business development, sales and marketing to guide the company's growth and rebranding efforts.

As a former Microsoft engineer, Gottlieb said a large portion of the company's revenue gets reinvested in research and development. Now the goal becomes pulling out actionable insights from its huge trove of data. "We're just scratching the surface with data," he said.

eMarketer estimates U.S. advertisers will spend $3.36 billion on real-time bidding (RTB) in 2013, and $8.49 billion, or 29%, of all digital display by 2017.

At the OMMA RTB L.A. conference Thursday, Gottlieb will share data collected from the company's proprietary crawlers across 3,000 publishers, analyzing the delivery of media buys from thousands of advertisers. Of the 1,000 top advertisers, about 708 purchased RTB media, he noted.

Since mid-May, these top advertisers invested 25% of their ad volume to real-time bidding, compared with ad networks at 33%, and 44%, direct. Adobe, for example, bought 26% of RTB media, 33% went to ad networks, and 41% direct, according to Gottlieb. BMW spends more than 30% on RTB, supporting its "Customize Your BMW 528i Sedan" campaign.

Top spenders allocating between 29% and 40% to RTB include Style and Fashion, Retail, Travel, Telecom, Non-Profit, and Advertising and Marketing. Real Estate, Arts & Entertainment, Family & Parenting, Gaming, Sports, and Media spend the least.

Large and small publishers remain consistent, selling about 21% of their inventory as RTB. Gottlieb attributes growth to maturing platforms and education about how to gain efficiencies.

The biggest gains come from ads with an immediate call to action. The 1-800-flowers.com ad encourages consumers to "save 15% on flowers & gifts." Branding campaigns are a little more difficult to quantify, compared with direct response -- because it's easy to measure success if the brand spends $100 on ads and receives $110 worth of orders.