Today, Yahoo!’s Right Media distributed a press release in the UK about its new transparency offering, Marketplace Select, for advertisers – undoubtedly a response to recent embarassments uncovered by UK’s New Media Age among others.
According to today’s New Media Age:
- “[Marketplace Select] comes after Right Media has been implicated in ad misplacement issues, the most recent of which found ads from top brands such as Orange and Virgin Media running across US fighting site Onlyfights.com (Online advertising hit again by misplacements; nma 19 June). The exchange also faced scrutiny when new media age found a site running 12 banner ads from brands including Virgin Media and O2 on one page (Ad exchanges face scrutiny over misplacement; nma 21 February).”
In the release, Denise Colella, VP International at Right Media, says that “this solution can help give buyers greater confidence to scale their overall budgets on the platform, which ultimately benefits all Exchange members.”
Marketplace Select starts with the Publisher or ad network who creates a site list for an “exchange buyer.” In turn, the buyer or advertiser selects from the list which sites they want their campaign to run on. Presumably, this will speak to branding ad buyers who are concerned about showing up within inappropriate content such as the example with OnlyFights.com.
It would appear that Right Media Exchange has relied on geo-targeting for its UK clients, to date. What they are now realizing is the importance of a brand-safe environment beyond the needs of scale and reach for performance driven campaigns.
In some ways, Right Media’s development of Marketplace Select can be seen as good news as the exchange makes baby steps toward becoming an exchange for remnant AND premium inventory rather than just remnant. Brand dollars typically stay away from remnant inventory and their adoption of the exchange model will be a key driver in the future.
It’s unclear whether Marketplace Select will be available for U.S. or other international buyers and sellers – or whether it will be available in the new Yahoo! APT platform.
No doubt the timing of running the press release the day after the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday hopes to split the difference between mollifying UK advertisers and worrying U.S. advertisers.
