“the executioner” opinion expressed below is written by Sam Temes, Associate, Platform Management, Ad Exchanges, at Razorfish.
The CEO of a major ad exchange recently likened the flow of data from real-time ad exchanges to a fire hose – I like to think of it as more of a broken water main. There is so much information coming out and so quickly that it’s impossible for most to do anything reasonable with it. Just participating in real-time bidding requires the processing of thousands of transactions per second, reliable data centers that can pass information instantaneously, and continuous up-time. As an agency buying on behalf of my advertisers, it is technology I know little about, but I know that my clients can benefit from the kinds of insights that result from it.
As more exchanges introduce real-time bidding in 2010 and ad networks, ad exchanges and data providers enter the platform space, there will be a rush to see who can deliver the best performance and the smoothest UI. But for a platform to truly meet an advertiser’s needs (and help grow the industry), it needs to have expert plumbing that both supports scale and speed, and also allows buyers to generate insights from the data that are both predictive and significant (not to mention interesting).
Having the best algorithm won’t be enough for the savviest agencies. We, on behalf of our advertisers, are already expecting to learn what makes exchange buys perform and what we can learn from performance to help advertisers’ broader marketing. The key to a best-in-class platform will be having an expert decisioning tool and the technology and analysis to make sense of the decisions for humans. As more players enter the demand side platform space, the competition for the best decisioning algorithm is sure to heat up. But in order for exchange based media buying to keep growing, we need the tools to prove to advertisers that we can make use of the information inside the box.
Follow Sam Temes (@SamTemes), Razorfish (@Razorfish) and AdExchanger.com (@adexchanger) on Twitter.
