AdExchanger.com Predictions for 2011: Publisher Technology

AdExchanger.com 2011 Predictions: Publisher Technology AdExchanger.com reached out to the publisher technology community for their predictions about the digital advertising ecosystem in 2011.

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Frank Addante, CEO, Rubicon Project

Publishers will realize that sales channels are a critical part of their revenue growth (ad networks, exchanges & DSPs) because they don’t have the sales coverage to reach every advertiser or the technology to support every campaign. RTB will be the key driver of this realization.
Defragmentation of inventory due to marketplaces centralizing inventory will cause RTB to see explosive growth.
Automation is going to put more strain on publishers, they are going to get killed with channel conflict and ad quality.
Further developments in regulation discussions around data will set the rules of the game, becoming more of an enabler for legit companies (similar to CAN-SPAM act in email – email industry thrived once the rules were defined) than a threat to the industry.

Michael Barrett, CEO, AdMeld

Programmatic buying will increase at least 4x globally. Contributing factors will be:

Further improvements in audience targeting and creative optimization will drive advertisers to shift more budgets to display, away from search, TV.
As big publishers get more comfortable with sell-side tech & audience selling,there will be a huge increase in the scale & quality of biddable inventory.
Mobile and video inventory will begin to hit RTB, cross-platform audience buying will begin to take hold.
RTB will emerge as a meaningful channel for guaranteed buys, branding campaigns.
Data management will get white hot as large publishers begin to more strategically tap the value of their first party data.

Tom Chavez, CEO, Krux Digital

I fear that in 2011 we’ll see a BP-scale data disaster that makes the AOL search spill, the Google street view kerfuffle, the Rapleaf hubbub, and the Facebook/MySpace id leaks look like minor disturbances. Cleanup and recovery will be costly for the offending company. Regulators and privacy advocates will use the debacle to bring their protests to a feverish pitch, but a split Congress (remember ex-Representative Rick Boucher?) will stymie any attempts at privacy legislation. In a lucky twist, legislative gridlock will give commerce, content, and advertising companies a little extra time to get their data house in order.

Mario Diez, CEO, quadrantONE

Premium marketplaces emerge to drive more value to holding company trading desks. Advertisers are already preparing to increase the amount they spend on real-time bidding inventory next year, making RTB the hottest area in display. The increased desire for premium, audience-based buying will make trading desks far more valuable for both premium publishers and advertisers looking for better intelligence and campaign analytics. Trading desks are already creating closer relationships between publishers and advertisers/agencies. As more money flows through the trading desks, the intermediaries who don’t own inventory are going to feel the pressure created by the new buying model, and premium sellers could be the main beneficiaries.

Rajeev Goel, CEO, PubMatic

RTB will remain the #1 driver of increased revenue for publishers. The most advanced publishers will begin to have RTB campaigns sold and controlled by their own sales force. Transparency and control of data will continue to be the #1 hot-button issue of 2011 – for consumers and publishers alike. However, continued market education will alleviate a lot of the fear and lead to improved solutions that benefit all parties.

Marc Kiven, Founder and CRO, Bright Tag

In 2011 publishers will start to seriously rethink all of their third-party data relationships as they wrestle with issues around privacy, transparency, the value of their data and the impact these issues have on their businesses.
Data collectors will deploy improved methodologies and use better practices for how they connect with, use and share the data they are “allowed” to collect from publishers.

Jonathan Mendez, CEO, Yieldbot

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Brand dollars continue glacial migration to digital with spending on building owned assets and Facebook amplification.
Twitter advertising drives traffic but agencies are slow to adapt to a real-time channel creating opportunities similar to early days of Search.
By EOY 2011 for vast majority of advertisers Google = Display same as Google= Search.
Delta between Search and Display spend continues to widen as Google focuses on local, mobile, location based search advertising.
Advertiser interest in massive and realtime link economy (Google, Twitter, Facebook, Bitly) and accompanying data begins shifting market power back to Publishers.

Steve Pelletier, CEO, FatTail

Premium publishers will de-emphasize ad exchanges and any other sales channels that do not fairly compensate them for the value of their brands and audiences.
Focus will shift from systematic pricing and buying of spot inventory to systematic pricing and buying of forward inventory.
The RFP step itself will be de-emphasized as orders are booked directly through automated channels.
A robust digital scatter market will emerge for transacting “last minute” guaranteed, transparent inventory as a middle ground between the spot and forward markets.
Straight Through Processing (STP) defined as system to system buying and invoicing will become a reality in 2011 and drive transaction costs down.

Steve Perks, GM, EMEA, aiMatch

In 2011 publishers will awaken from their slumber, realizing that many of the third parties with which they do business extract more value than they add. Agency Groups and portals invested heavily in technology over the past four years. Now it’s the publishers’ turn. To monetize platforms like mobile and video, more and more publishers will invest in innovative technology, employing multiple data sources and advanced sales & pricing analytics to package their inventory for agencies and exchanges.

John Ramey, Founder & CEO, isocket

A blessing and challenge is that our industry and tools are starting to work more closely together. I think we’ll see more “are they friends or foes?” situations like the recent AppNexus vs Google post. It’s like a big game of Risk.

Tom Shields, CEO, Yieldex

In 2011, the display ad galaxy’s focus will turn from armies of clone impressions on exchanges, to premium inventory managed by Jedi ad ops teams, and balance will be restored to the universe of buyers and sellers. In other words, publishers will they turn their attention from how to squeak a little bit more from the low-value inventory, to how do they capitalize on their strengths in context and related audiences. Agency trading desks will begin to enable (and prefer) guaranteed buys of audiences directly from premium publishers through new programmatic interfaces, instead of RTB in a sea of impressions. And publishers will embrace solutions that provide inventory transparency and accurate availability to take advantage of these new sales channels.

David Soloff, CEO, Metamarkets

2011 will feature ad technology focusing on the unmet need for publisher revenue enhancement via core ad pricing, dynamic channel allocation and sales operations. Despite a tremendous amount of attention paid to emerging data and privacy issues in 2010, there remain a number of ‘first order’ problems that have not as yet been addressed: pricing, sales channel discipline, market indexing, channel management. These are high leverage opportunities which will (re)emerge to move recent data and targeting hot topics to the back burner. Call me a contrarian, but we may well see investors and deep pocketed acquirers begin to pay close attention to businesses featuring real technology for publisher revenue and margin enhancement.

Curt Viebranz, CEO, ad summos

The ability to buy premium audiences at scale will swing ad sales back to premium publishers.
We just witnessed a record quarter for digital revenue, and the surge will continue next year as more advertisers shift their brand messaging online.
Technology enhancements by premium publishers will drive higher digital ad spending In addition, better inventory analysis, improved understanding of ROI, and a complete picture of how online ads affect offline behavior will make premium publishers far more appealing than ad networks or exchanges.

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