Matt Spiegel is CEO of OMG Digital, the digital media buying division of Omnicom Group.
Certainly, the new Google DoubleClick Ad Exchange will have big impact because it’s the first sizable pool of inventory which has real-time bidding – this is what we’ve been waiting for.
Being able to buy using real-time bidding is important for two reasons:
- We want to pay for the value of the impression based on that impression.
- We want to make those value decisions based on targeting criteria that we can bring to the table.
Today, we have certain ability to impact those targeting decisions much like there is in search from a bid rule perspective, but the targeting decisions are made in an offline way, if you will. What I mean by this is we look at performance, audience and contextual data and then model out that information to create segments and micro-segments which we can then bid on. In a real-time, bidded environment, those pieces come together and, in a real-time way, we can have a model for that impression and bid for it right away.
The impact on the industry of the new exchange from Google is significant because of the scale of the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. There’s a ton of inventory. We haven’t seen that scale ever on a real-time basis. AppNexus is out in the marketplace, but it’s clearly a smaller pool of inventory.
Regarding concerns, I don’t see any right now. Of course, no one wants to see Google hold all the cards, but Google is innovating and we can’t give them anything but kudos from that perspective. For the moment, it’s good stuff.