The Big Five Of Ad Spend; ATD Adds OOH - Uh OOH?; Real-Time Bidding Stories

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The Big Five Of Ad Spend

Looking at the numbers, and beyond the usual suspects (Google, Facebook, etc.), eMarketer’s David Halloran remarks in a company blog post, “Many marketers can often cost-effectively use a blend of ad networks and direct ad buys from smaller sites to improve their campaign’s reach.” Whoa – ad network love! But he still sees complexity in the solution as a potential hurdle. eMarketer also provides its latest online ad revenue growth projections for the five largest ad-selling (usual suspect) companies claiming that 68% of all of 2011’s total online ad spending will flow thru Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL and Facebook. Read more and get some graphs for your PPT.

ATD Buying OOH

Oh, look at you, cross-channel, agency trading desk! MediaPost’s Joe Mandese reports that MDC Partners’ Varick Media has added the out-of-home (OOH) channel “arrow” to its agency trading desk quiver. Mandese writes, “While the first deal implemented by VMM’s new out-of-home capability was a digital out-of-home buy for News Corp.’s The Daily, the MDC unit said it is capable of buying conventional outdoor media, including billboards, via the system.” Read more.

RTB For The Kids

Ad network CEO George John of Rocket Fuel thinks real-time bidding is so great, kids will love it, too. Here’s what he says in an opinion piece on DIGIDAY: “There’s no need to be afraid of real-time bidding. It’s a tremendous innovation that allows a degree of effectiveness in campaign execution that has historically only been possible through direct channels like mail, email and on-site personalization. When our kids grow up and claw their way into middle management at ad agencies, they’ll be amazed we ever bought ad space any other way.” FTK – For The Kids!

The RTB Buck Does Not Stop Here

Still more real-time bidding (RTB) news and views… TRAFFIQ’s Chris O’Hara offers in an opinion piece on the eConsultancy blog, “I recently had lunch with a large vertical publisher who told me that he recently discovered that a small amount of his inventory was consistently being won at a $1,700 CPM (it appears as though some DSPs do not offer a pricing cap for automatic bids)!” From here, two questions: How to scale that $1,700 CPM inventory? And, what was in that lunch? Read more on his RTB views.

Opening The Video Ad Exchange

Following up on yesterday’s news that Australia publisher Fairfax is saying “no” to DSPs and agency trading desks, Australia’s AdNews says that agency Ikon Communications is demanding more transparency in video ad exchanges. AdNews’ David Blight reports, “Ikon currently commits 20% of its digital video budget to video exchanges, but has said that there are potential problems in the video space. These problems relate to the potential for brands’ ads to run on unsavoury sites, and to run as ‘fake’ ads, meaning ads which use autoplay, are below the fold or are not on brand-safe sites.” Read more unsavouries.

Maxing Opto

Visual IQ analytics and solutions dude, Joe Giannantonio, offers up some optimization rules of the road in a post on his company’s blog. He writes that marketers should have in place three, key elements of optimization at the outset of their campaign, “Definitions of specific goals, targets and objectives; Mechanisms to accurately measure the key performance indicators associated with those goals; and a process to cost-effectively execute optimization actions.” Oh, that’s going to require some more explanation, isn’t it? Get it here.

Delivering The Display Kool-Aid

Scribed Media’s Peter Cervieri has published a recent video interview with Google VP of Product Neal Mohan from last month’s Federated Media Conversational Marketing conference. Among other topics, Mohan addresses his company’s desire to serve the publisher with real-time bidding tech, dynamic creative and – most importantly in his view – a single cross-channel platform through which publishers can manage yield. -Hey, isn’t that same pitch for advertisers? See the interview. The juggernaut moves on.

The Attribution Grail