Triggit announced its new self-service, demand-side platform for online display advertising today. Read more on TechCrunch.
AdExchanger.com spoke to Triggit CEO Zach Coelius about the launch and his expectations for the product.
AdExchanger.com: How different is this new platform then what you have been running to date?
ZC: Our launch today is the beta version of our Real-Time Bidding (RTB) platform for marketers and their agencies. It is a dramatic improvement on the alpha version we pushed out to clients a couple months ago. It enables clients to set-up, target and control their campaigns with a fully self-service interface. The key difference is that we are starting to put the full power of RTB into the hands of marketers. This means clients can use their own retargeting values, audience segments and third party data from leading providers to transparently buy media across all the major RTB exchanges. With RTB, our clients are able to target down to specific sites while being able to leverage the scale of the billions of available daily impressions. The platform also enables them to manage universal frequency capping and see unified analytics, reporting and optimization.
We have been working hard for the last year to build the real time bidding technology that enables the power and ease of use of this platform. We are excited to get it in the hands of new users and hear their feedback.
Our plan is to make the self-serve platform as widely available as possible. For the first few weeks we’ll be managing the flow of new advertisers, but in the very near future we hope to be able to throw the doors open to every one. Our goal is to make display advertising as easy to manage at scale as search, which ought to make our platform useful for advertisers of all sizes.
Given advertisers are bidding in an exchange environment, can advertisers use verification/visibility companies? Do you see as semantic or contextual data as an important bidding element?
I think one of the largest misconceptions in the market today is to equate all exchanges with the blind, cheap, and poorly performing inventory that the last generation of exchanges used to provide. That is no longer the case. One of the most important innovations with Real Time Bidding is that we bid on a transparent per impression basis. What that means to the client is that we are able to provide them with full transparency into what sites are available on the exchanges and let them choose where they would like their ads to run. For clients with brand sensitivity that means we can restrict their campaigns to only run on highly reputable sites like CNN, Forbes, The NY Times or Yahoo. For clients with more flexibility, they can take advantage of the lower prices of long tail inventory and run across sites with a range of quality. The end result is that it is no longer about verification after a campaign has run–instead it is about giving clients the ability to choose where their ads are to run before the campaign even begins. Verification makes a ton of sense when you are working with an Ad Network that doesn’t give you ability to choose where your ads run, and it makes less sense with RTB. Though if clients want to use verification we are more then happy to support it.
We currently don’t use contextual or semantic data for targeting. We are actively exploring this at the moment and we are looking forward to integrating with semantic and contextual partners and making their data accessible through our platform.
Discuss your real-time attribution capabilities. What does Triggit offer? For example, can Triggit take information from a conversion in real-time and inform the bidding process?
One of the most important jobs of our RTB Platform is to figure out what impressions to bid for and how much to bid. On of the key drivers of that process is tracking every ad that we serve to every user, the interaction with those ads and all of the downstream clicks, site interactions and conversions. That data is recorded and made available to the bidder in real time so that the platform can constantly be adjusting its bids according to the results. In computer geek speak that means we are doing almost as many writes as we are reads. This attribution process also enables us to do some very interesting things with view-through and impression attribution to track and analyze the brand building value of ads. We are really excited to build out these capabilities with our clients and enable them to better evaluate and optimize the effectiveness of their display campaigns.
By John Ebbert
