• The S&DP
    There's some revealing language in a status update released by Rubicon Project today that signals its shift from a sell-side to a demand-side -- or at the very least -- a neutral platform. And it comes from none other than CEO and Founder Frank Addante, who while explaining the spectacular growth of its REVV real-time ad trading platform, gave top billing to the buy-side. "Our momentum stems from the fact that Rubicon Project is solving the biggest problem in digital advertising today -- making it easier for advertisers and publishers around the globe to buy and sell digital advertising," he …
  • The Race To Zero
    Some interesting shifts are taking place in the whole paid vs. earned/owned media business that have some big implications for the paid part. You know, advertising. First I got briefed on an important milestone story that I reported on today that VivaKi had locked up a new, powerful platform that will give it the ability to strategically plan earned media with the same scientific rigor as paid media (see related story in today's RTM Daily). In other words, the VivaKi shops -- and their clients -- now have the ability know reasonably well how much money they don't have to …
  • Either The Bots Are Buying $4 Bil. Worth Of Goods, Or You've Got Some Explaining To Do...
    Machines have helped make the buying and selling of inventory easier, but when they are told to buy and sell fraudulent inventory, a lot of money ends up stolen and or lost. New research from Solve Media shows that on 2013's current path, advertisers could lose more than $3 billion online and up to $1 billion in mobile due to ad fraud. In addition to ghost sites, publishers and advertisers also need to be wary of bots that provide fraudulent clicks and impressions to boost sites up in indexing tools such as comScore. Ari Jacoby, Solve Media's CEO, spoke with …
  • Poll Indicates 'Engagement,' Not 'Performance' Driving Programmatic
    Programmatic media-buying may have a reputation for being performance driven, but an informal survey of agency and marketer executives indicates that may not be their primary goal. To find out what's really driving the programmatic marketplace, Netmining recently surveyed 131 agency and client execs and found "engagement metrics" was the No. 1 criteria, cited by 73% of the respondents.
  • TV Or Not To Be, Programmatic Trading Is The Question
    Maybe I'm just reading between the lines, but I thought there were some telling things said by media buyers during MEDIA magazine's Outfront Forum in NYC Tuesday that suggest the science of programmatic audience buying may soon begin to impact the way they buy television, as well as online media. The forum was a little unusual, for sure, with some journalists, including myself, role-playing TV network sales executives in a mock debate with some of Madison Avenue's biggest media buyers. I say mock, but there were some really important things said. When moderator David Verklin posed the question about the …
  • On The Bridge Of Convenient And Creepy
    I saw a recent interview with Jonathon Rosen, business development director for WirelessWERX in Directions Magazine about real-time indoor location analytics. Rosen's company places sensors around a store that communicate with customers' mobile phones anonymously to collect data. The data is processed in real-time, and the store ends up with heat maps based on traffic, the path the consumer took around the store, and more. It all made me think: when does cool and convenient turn creepy? Recently, Berg Insight predicted that location-based advertising will reach $8.5 billion (up from $688 million) by 2017. Clearly, the idea of knowing where …
  • Exchange-Based Media Dominate Big Agency Spending: RTB Is Growing Fast, But Still An Also-Ran
    The other day I wrote about some new data from a variety of sources -- the IAB, Pivotal Research Group and Accordant Media -- indicating that the expansion of the exchange-based media marketplace might be taking some steam out of the overall growth of digital media, mainly because of their contribution to the overall efficiency of digital marketing campaigns. If that's the case, it's most likely coming from long- and mid-tail marketers and agencies, because some important new data suggests it's still a tiny share of what's being bought by the big agency holding companies. The data, which comes from …
  • What Capacity For Opacity?
    The thing I like about our marketplace is that it's based on efficiency and reason, of course. What I love about it, is how transparent it is. Because without transparency -- the free flow of information -- how can you have a genuine value exchange? So let's agree that's a good thing. If it is, then the data released today by Accordant Media is a good sign that we're moving in the right direction.
  • Is RTB Helping To Increase The Pie?
    You've probably seen the headlines that online ad growth set another record, right? But if you look below the top line of the the IAB's Internet ad report, you'll see that most of that growth is coming not from the premium display advertising marketplace, but from two big biddable inventory sources: Google and Facebook. "While total online advertising posted a solid growth rate of 15% during 2012, we can clearly see that if we strip out growth from Google and Facebook, the rest of online advertising likely grew by 3.8%," Pivotal Research Group's Brian Wieser said in an equity research …
  • Turn's "MVA" Goes To...
    At the end of a sports season, the league's top performer receives an MVP award. In the advertising world, isn't it time we started to recognize the MVA (Most Valuable Audience)? New research from cloud marketing platform Turn shows that brands spend 85% more to reach the top 2% of online consumers on real-time marketplaces. The report says that those 2% of online consumers are shown 24 times the amount of ads as the average digital consumer. The data was collected from RTB marketplaces between January and March 2013. So what does that 2% look like? Drumroll please...
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